Judge: FBI can’t ‘censor’ agent’s book on counter-terror failures

After a legal battle that stretched for nearly seven years, an FBI agent has won the right to publish a manuscript detailing his claims that the agency botched an investigation into the use of non-profit groups to raise funds for Hamas.

[efoods]However, it was a pyrrhic victory for the agent, Robert Wright Jr., since the passage of time appears to have diminished the market for his book. Several alleged Hamas operatives in the U.S. have also been charged and convicted since Wright’s fight with the FBI began.

In an unsparing 41-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler lit into the FBI for its handling of Wright’s efforts to publish “Fatal Betrayals,” an expose what he viewed as mishandling of vital terror funding probes in the 1990s.

“This is a sad and discouraging tale about the determined efforts of the FBI to censor various portions of a 500-page manuscript,” Kessler wrote in her ruling dated May 6. “In its efforts to suppress this information, the FBI repeatedly changes its position, presented formalistic objections to release of various portions of the documents in question, admitted finally that much of the material it sought to suppress was in fact in the public domain and had been all along, and now conceded that several of the reasons it originally offered for censorship no longer have any validity.”

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