Weapons of Mass Redaction

[chiburb]

Fantastic Dowd today (NY Times). She writes a 'memo' from Cheney to the Saudi ambassador...

Snip:

We didn't let a thing slip on our private energy meetings where we took care of our mutual friends in the (blank) industry; we kept the bidding closed on the Halliburton contracts to rebuild Iraq, and we set up our own C.I.A. within the Pentagon to produce the intelligence we wanted to link Al Qaeda to Saddam rather than to your country.

We've classified the entire section of the 9/11 report that deals with the (blank) family's support of charitable groups that benefit terrorists, including mentions of your wife's checks inexplicably winding up in the bank accounts of two of the hijackers. (Lynn says to tell Princess (blank) we have four tickets for the (blank) ballet at the Kennedy Center.)

We're not even letting Bob Graham mention the name of your country. We threatened to throw him in the federal slammer if he calls (blank) anything but "a foreign government."

I know you're worried that the whiny widows of 9/11 will throw another hissy-fit when they see all the blacked-out material, like they did when you whisked Osama's family out of the U.S. on a private jet right after the attacks. But we didn't go this far down the road of pushing aside incriminating evidence about you guys and blaming 9/11 on Saddam to turn back now because a few thousand families can't get their darn closure.


(The blank spaces show as BLACK in her column, as a 'redacted'/censored passage will in the 9/11 report. If you ever needed an excuse to register to the Times (as if Krugman isn't enough?) this is it. Free, lie in the required spots if you want to, but read this!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/23/opinion/23DOWD.html?hp

(edited to add (blanks)

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Good Dowd today

I agree that the original article is a must read just to see all the redactions that can't be seen in your snip. She really sticks it to Cheney.

[chiburb]

2. The beautiful part is that her redactions

Are "letter specific". For example, she uses 3 slashes for "oil". Makes it real easy to fill in the blanks!

[jackstraw45]

3. Fantastic

I needed a good laugh this morning. If only it wasn't all true.