From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. Another week, another round of government officials raising their right hands.

Between the televised hearings on Iraqi prisoner abuse and the televised hearings on the 9-11 Commission,

it's easy to feel that we're privy to history in the making.

But many more hearings happen behind closed doors. For example, in a closed session with the 9-11 Commission back in February,

a former FBI translator named Sebel Edmonds described intelligence reports that crossed her desk

in the summer of 2001. She later told the independent of

London that those reports included warnings that Al-Qaeda planned to fly hijacked airplanes into

U.S. skyscrapers and included a general time frame for the planned attack. Her allegations were

immediately picked up by news outlets around the world,

but hardly at all here in the U.S. and the Justice Department is doing its best to keep it that way.

It recently blocked Edmonds from testifying in a lawsuit brought by families of 9-11 victims,

and this week it took the rare step of retroactively classifying information about

her given to Congress almost two years ago. As of Friday, Edmund's allegations had yet to

appear in the Washington Post, but they did appear in the Post's online edition in a column by

Jefferson Morley. Jeff, welcome to the show. Thank you. This past Thursday,

the New York Times made its first mention of Sebel Edmund's name. That story was headlined,

material given to Congress in 2002 is now classified. Did you see that piece? Yes, I did.

Did it strike you as weird, Jeff, that the New York

Times wrote a story about an extraordinary case of the government trying to retroactively classify

something that was already a part of the congressional record, and yet the story about it never

really discloses the substance of the allegations that the government

...