Is this how a "Free" country conducts itself...Is this the "Freedom" these very people fight and die for...... Censorship .....this is a fucking outrage...it is so wrong...on so many levels....

read the whole story here: http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/ArticleID/11463

U.S. Army delays, alters medical studies under little-known scientific censorship program; Policy 'stifles scientific discourse,' says an Army epidemiologist

Since 2006, U.S. Army censors have scrutinized hundreds of medical studies, scientific posters, abstracts, and Powerpoint presentations authored by doctors and scientists at Walter Reed and other Army medical research centers, documents obtained with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal—part of a little-known prepublication review process called "Actionable Medical Information Review."
The program is intended to deny Iraqi and Afghan insurgents sensitive data such as combat injury and death rates. But dozens of studies reviewed under the program did not involve research related to combat operations. They did, however, include potentially controversial research, such as studies of the effects of war on soldiers'children and families, hospital-acquired infections, veterans' post-deployment adjustment issues, refugees, suicide, alcoholism, vaccines, cancer among veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, and problems with military health care databases.
More than 300 scientific documents have been reviewed by Army censors to date. Overall, fewer than half have been cleared for publication in their original form. In 2007, 6 percent of papers were denied permission for public disclosure, but so far this year that denial rate has nearly tripled to 17 percent.
Medical journals contacted by epiNewswire had not been informed that the review process exists, or that Army researchers' scientific papers may have been altered at the behest of censors.
Army researchers whose work is suppressed or altered by censors have few appeal options, and to date, no appeals panel has been convened. The program "stifles scientific discourse," according to one Army epidemiologist who faces disciplinary action after writing a letter to the editor of Stars & Stripes without seeking censors' permission. "Those who stand to lose the most from this policy are the service members it was ostensibly designed to protect," he contends.