Melville House Books

“A former Defense Intelligence Agency officer whose Afghan memoir was belatedly censored by the Pentagon filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to have the book’s full text restored in future printings,” according to a New York Times report by Scott Shane. The “belatedly censored” euphemism refers to the fact that, on the taxpayer’s dime, the Pentagon bought and destroyed 10,000 copies of the previously approved and already published book, Operation Dark Heart by Anthony A. Shaffer. (See the earlier MobyLives report.)

Shaffer’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press, subsequently rushed out a new version of the book in which “passages were removed from 250 of the book’s 320 pages.” The book is now a bestseller.

As the Times report notes, “The lawsuit claims that ‘little to none’ of the information blacked out of the second printing is actually classified and that the censorship violated Mr. Shaffer’s First Amendment rights. ‘Many of the asserted redactions are objectively absurd,’ the lawsuit says.”

Meanwhile, advance readers copies of the original, uncensored book are “still for sale on eBay for $1,995 to $4,995.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.