Katrina vanden Heuvel: Suppressing News: Déjà Vu (The Nation)

BLOG | Posted 02/25/2007 @ 11:45am
Suppressing News: Déjà Vu


"The assault on a free press ...should be recognized for what it is," wrote New York Times columnist Frank Rich last July, "another desperate ploy by officials trying to hide their own lethal mistakes in the shadows."

While the Bush Administration's assault on free, independent and aggressive media has been unparalleled, US government attempts to suppress information are not new. I was reminded of that essential fact this weekend while reading an obituary of Ronald Hilton, an influential scholar on Latin America who played a central role in The Nation's expose of CIA preparations for the Bay of Pigs.

Obituaries have many purposes. They can celebrate a person's work, accomplishments and contributions. And this one did--noting that Hilton was a courageous man and scholar. But obituaries also serve to set the record straight--and in this case, to issue a mea culpa for Times editors ( living and dead) who regret the paper's 1960 decision to accede to Kennedy Administration requests to withhold (on national security grounds) its article about the impending, disastrous CIA attack. (There have been other mea culpas: Last year, in an editorial, the Times wrote that "it seems in hindsight that the editors were over-cautious" by not printing what they knew about the invasion.)

The memory of that journalistic failure continues to play a role at the Times. For example, when the Administration vituperatively attacked the paper last year--even threatening legal action--for publishing an important investigative article on banking records and terrorism, executive editor Bill Keller's open letter explaining the decision to publish made explicit reference to the Times's handling of the Bay of Pigs story. "Our biggest failures," Keller wrote, "have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After the Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=169316