The Washington Post revealed recently the CIA is operating a global network of secret prisons for terrorism suspects. But at the Pentagon's request, they wouldn't say where those prisons were.

The group Human Rights Watch, citing military flight records, says Poland and Romania, to name two (those countries deny the allegation; however, they are part of the "war on terrror.")

And one critic said the Post's refusal to give the prisons' locations was the greatest act of media self-censorship since the New York Times acquiesed to White House pressure on the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

From Democracy Now!:

The Post declined to come on our program to discuss their decision. Instead, a spokesperson referred us to a statement made by Executive Editor Len Downie on CNN last Thursday. Downie said, "In this case, we agreed to keep the names of those particular countries out, because we were told, and it seems reasonable to us, that there could be terrorist retaliation against those countries, or more importantly, disruption of other very important intelligence activities, antiterrorist activities." The Post has drawn criticism for acquiescing to the government's demand. Commenting on the Post's rationale, the media watch-dog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) said, "The possibility that illegal, unpopular government actions might be disrupted is not a consequence to be feared, however-it's the whole point of the First Amendment."

Democracy Now! also spoke with Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, a public-interest documentation center in Washington:

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, you say this is the most egregious censorship of a paper in decades, going back to the Bay of Pigs. Can you explain?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, there are many examples (and there are many that we don't even know about) of the U.S. government stepping in with very high executives of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the New Republic and other newspapers and media outlets across the country and saying: ‘Please don't run this story because it will compromise our national security interest.’ And the most famous is the -- in 1961 when the New York Times was going to run a story on the pending invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, and John Kennedy picked up the phone and called the publisher of the New York Times and said: ‘Please don't run this story.’ The Times did run the story but they whittled it down significantly, eliminating exactly those types of details: when, where, who, how many, etc. And afterwards, of course, the President and his advisors said they wished that the Times had run the full story so that the invasion, which failed, would have been aborted.

But you have a similar situation here in terms of the magnitude of this issue, but the arguments are different. In this case, we don't have U.S. soldiers whose lives are on the line. We basically have a situation where our immediate security is not compromised and where one has to evaluate whether the security of these actual countries truly is compromised. And I think if, you know, the presidents of Romania and Poland had picked up the phone and called the Washington Post and said: ‘We know this is a secret operation. We are worried about it being published,’ then, perhaps, you know, you could have had an argument that there was an issue here. But to simply buy into this presentation by high Pentagon, C.I.A. and White House officials that our national security is at stake in keeping the locations of these secret detention centers secret, I think, is wrong. What is at stake is these secret detention centers. And the Romanians, the Poles and other Eastern European citizens have been building a civil society focused on the abuses of the past—museums, monuments, efforts to say, you know, ‘Never again!’ And here the poetic, you know, irony is that the C.I.A. appears to be using actually Soviet gulags that were in place in these countries when the Soviet Union was running them.