Saturday, May 13, 2006

A sentence too hot to handle?

Friday's New York Times had a story about Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the number 3 man at the CIA until his resignation earlier this week -- just before the cops showed up, a standard pattern for the Bush administration. There is one strange thing about the article: the final sentence that appeared in the print edition (page A24) is missing from the web version. Here is that sentence:

Mr Foggo was first posted overseas to Honduras, in the mid-1980's, when the CIA station there was a hub for the American-backed war against the Communist Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua, intelligence officials say. Before his foreign posting in Frankfurt, he also served in Mexico City, Panama, and Vienna, one of the CIA's largest overseas stations, where Western and Soviet bloc intelligence agencies often crossed paths during the cold war.

So why is this missing from the web version? If it was a space issue, we'd expect the reverse pattern. Of course accidents happen. But was there something about the Honduras segment, with its implicit reference to John Negroponte's Contra linkages, that was considered unwise upon reflection after it went to the presses?

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