In September, the Defense Department spent $47,300 to purchase and destroy the entire first printing of “Operation Dark Heart” by Anthony A. Shaffer, asserting that it contained classified information.
The book was hastily reprinted with many passages blacked out and has become a best seller. But unredacted advance copies of the book, among a few dozen distributed by St. Martin’s Press before the Pentagon’s intervention, are still for sale on eBay for $1,995 to $4,995.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court here, recounts how Mr. Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, submitted his original manuscript to the Army to be checked for classified information and got official approval to publish it last January. But when the Defense Intelligence Agency saw the manuscript in May and showed it to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, all three agencies asserted that the approved manuscript still contained secrets.
After a second review was completed, passages were removed from 250 of the book’s 320 pages.
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.
Mr. Shaffer’s lawyer, Mark S. Zaid, said that while his client agreed to allow publication of the hardback with the government’s redactions, “we reserved the right to come back and challenge the decision in court.”
A paperback edition is scheduled for publication next year, and Mr. Shaffer is asking the court to order the Pentagon not to require the redactions in the new edition and not to pursue civil or criminal penalties against him for releasing it.
A Defense Department spokesman, Col. Dave Lapan, said that by policy, he could not comment on pending litigation.
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