Opinion | The Government Had to Approve This Op-Ed

I joined the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in 1981. At that time, despite the Cold War obsession with national security, service members and intelligence officers rarely had to submit their writings before publication. Two years later, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive that would have subjected millions of government employees to prepublication review. That directive was so controversial, and so obviously at odds with free speech values, that Congress held hearings, and Mr. Reagan rescinded it.

In the years since, however, 17 military and civilian agencies have instituted their own prepublication review regimes, according to an analysis by the A.C.L.U. and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which are representing us in our lawsuit. The rules about which employees are required to submit to review are confusing and inconsistent among agencies. The criteria for what gets censored are unclear. The time it takes to have a manuscript approved can stretch to years.

Of course, vital intelligence and operational information must be protected. But no review system will guard against those who are determined to divulge government secrets. At its best, then, this review should confirm that employees are not inadvertently disclosing information that would actually harm national security. My own experience shows, however, that this is not always the way the system works.

Three years ago, during a presidential race in which Mr. Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, was pledging to “bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” I felt I needed to share what I knew about the destructiveness of torture, and about the struggle many of us had waged to stop the abuse of prisoners in American custody after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. As deputy commander of the Department of Defense Criminal Investigation Task Force, I had protested prisoner abuse to my superiors, and I had shared what I knew with Senate investigators. With the subject of torture again thrust into the center of the national debate, I wanted to write a book that would make the case why these abuses should never be repeated.

I would never publish classified material. I carefully avoided it, and meticulously cited congressional hearings and official investigations to show that the information I included was already public. In January 2017, I submitted my manuscript to the military. Defense Department regulations provide for a review process of at least 30 working days, but the government held my manuscript for 233 days. I finally got it back, months after the planned publication date, littered with unnecessary redactions of already published material.