Sept 10, 2010 - Burn 10000 books Day - Pentagon buys, destroys memoir

The Pentagon bought and destroyed nearly 10 thousand copies of a spy memoir that allegedly revealed intelligence secrets and was a threat to national security.

(κάποιοι νοστάλγησαν τον παλιό καλό καιρό) 

The book, "Operation Dark Heart" by Anthony Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, recounts his five month tour in Afghanistan. The Pentagon had to pay the publisher of the book 47 thousand dollars in tax payer's money to acquire the books and destroy them. The book reveals that the United States, in an intelligence operation code named Able Danger had identified Mohammad Atta, the alleged ringleader of the September 11 attacks, as a terrorist threat one year before the attacks took place. 

In an interview with Press TV, Shaffer said he informed the 9/11 commission about Atta, but it never appeared in the final report of the commission. According to The New York Times the book had already gone through several rounds of review by army officers before being published, however after it came out "the Defense Intelligence Agency saw the manuscript in July and showed it to other spy agencies, reviewers identified more than 200 passages suspected of containing classified information, setting off a scramble by Pentagon officials to stop the book's distribution". Shaffer told Press TV that Pentagon's claims that there were national security breaches in his book are simply not true and that the book just talks about bureaucratic bungling that hampered US intelligence operations against the Taliban. 

Critics believe that Pentagon's attempts to censor the book might backfire. One similar episode took place in 1964 when the CIA's attempts to suppress a book about the agency titled "The Invisible Government" made it a national best seller.