No move to ban sale of controversial book on OBL: Pentagon
The Pentagon has ruled out any move to ban the sale of the controversial book, No Easy Day, on the killing of Osama bin Laden, which it says has been written by a former Navy SEAL in breach of contractual obligations and contains classified information.
"There's been no directive from this department to withhold sale of the book from military exchanges," the Pentagon Press Secretary George Little told reporters at a news conference in response to a series of questions on the controversial book that hit the stands on Tuesday.
"This book is being made widely available in bookstores and online. It is not our typical practice to get into the business of deciding what and what does not go on bookshelves in military exchanges," he said.
"But that doesn't mean in any way, shape or form that we don't have serious concerns about the fact that this process of pre-publication review was not followed," Little said.
"This is a solemn obligation. The author in this case elected not to abide by his legal obligations. "That's disheartening and, frankly, is something that we're taking a very close look at," he said.
Meanwhile, Rear Admiral Sean Pybus, who heads the Naval Special Warfare Command, in a letter to the work force said that details in the book may provide enemies with dangerous insight into their secretive operations. Hawking details about a mission and selling other details of SEAL training and operations puts the force and their families at risk.
"For an elite force that should be humble and disciplined for life, we are certainly not appearing to be so," Pybus wrote in a letter to the roughly 8,000 troops under his command. "We owe our chain of command much better than this," he added.
"It was eloquent and to the point and addressed the importance of protecting our special operations culture," Little said.
"We're prepared to look at ways of shoring up our belief that these kinds of books should receive pre-publication review. There's no doubt about it.
"And remember here, the sole yardstick is classification. This is a former service member who wrote a book. This is about merely trying to protect classified information. It's not about trying to prevent the telling of a story. That's the sole yardstick, is classification," he said.
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