'No Easy Day': Bad precedent being set?

[image error]

I've
been reading No Easy Day, which I find a
well-done but fairly typical tale by a Navy SEAL who by luck and hard work happened
to be in on the bin Laden kill.

What
worries me is all the talk of pre-publication review by the Pentagon. I know
CIA does that sort of thing, but I don't remember the military doing it much. I
read all the books by guys like Hugh
Shelton, Tommy
R. Franks, and David
Crist, and I don't recall much talk of the Defense Department
getting to peek at the books first. I mean, I doubt that Eisenhower submitted Crusade in Europe to
some lawyer at the Pentagon before it went to press.

So I
think it would be a bad thing if people came to expect some sort of right of
the military to review memoirs. I
suspect that a lot of the criticism of the book is being provoked not by legal
concerns but by anger among SEALs and the like that the author violated the
cultural code of the Special Ops community and blabbed. 

Necessary
disclosure: My books are published by Penguin Press, which is under the same
corporate umbrella as Dutton, which published No Easy Day.