According to Library Journal,
Mendell Morgan, Dean of Library Services at the University of the Incarnate Word (UIW) in San Antonio, has canceled the library’s subscription to the print version of the New York Times, citing “a change in quality and shift in coverage” and the importance of protesting the newspaper’s decision to publish an article on how the government traces money transfers that can be used to fund terrorist activities.
This is a strange decision for a library to take — and an act based on faulty research that any librarian worth their salt should be ashamed of! The administration’s lashing out at the NY Times is largely a political red herring meant to cloud the fact that these types of programs have been publically known about since 2001 and that they are of dubious legality to say the least.
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush announced the freezing of terrorist bank assets and the establishment of a “foreign terrorist asset tracking center at the Department of the Treasury to identify and investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks.” And on November 7, 2001, Secretary of the treasury Paul O’Neill announced that the “United States, along with an ‘international coalition,’ had begun to block assets, to seize books, records and evidence, and to follow audit trails to track terrorist cells poised to do violence to our common interests.”
The ALA should immediately denounce this action as both censorship and an overtly partisan political act unbecoming of a library.
For more, see Media Matters
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