Book Burning – Bad If A Church Does It, But OK for the US Government?

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon bought up nearly every copy of “Operation Dark Heart” from St. Martin’s Press, and then destroyed all the books “to protect secrets.” (The fact is noted in 3 paragraphs at the bottom of an unrelated post regarding the latest Afghan War casualties.) 

While a redacted edition is available in hardcover and in a Kindle edition proponents of free speech must certainly hope that one of the 100 uncensored copies which escaped the clutches of government censors and are now being sold for upwards of $2000 on the Internet, will soon be released in a full-text file by WikiLeaks or a similar organization. (One copy is owned by the NY Times, which originally published the "teaser" pages shown here.) 

And who paid for this egregious act of censorship? The American taxpayer, of course, to the tune of about $50,000 dollars. As Gabriel Schoenfeld remarked in a more detailed accounting by the Times, “There’s smart secrecy and stupid secrecy, and this whole episode sounds like stupid secrecy.” That's putting it mildly, Mr. Schoenfeld.