Curtain Call: A Response to Edward Curtin

Recently it came to our attention that one of our writers, Edward Curtin, accused us of suspiciously removing one his articles from our site.

This is patently false. His piece, which by all accounts wasn’t groundbreaking, was certainly not “eliminated”, “scratched” or “excised” as Curtin scurrilously claims.

The article in question, The CIA, Then and Now, is still published. It has never been removed, edited or kept behind some fictitious gate. It was simply bumped from our main page’s sidebar after a day or two, as only a certain number of articles can fit into our jam-packed Weekend Edition lineup.

Curtin’s piece had already appeared on multiple websites, and we tend to give top billing to originals, so his article was moved (along with 5-6 others) to the back of the line after its fair shake on CounterPunch’s main page.

Ed claims to have reached out to inquire why his piece wasn’t to be found on the front page but failed to get a prompt reply. His emails arrived over the weekend when both of us try to take a break from our steady stream of emails. At the time, Jeffrey, who Ed claims to have reached out to, was taking a much-needed break on the Oregon coast, doing his best to refrain from opening his laptop.

Meanwhile, Curtin believed Jeff’s non-response was proof CounterPunch is part of some deep plot to censor him, falsely claiming at the time that his piece had vanished into thin air.

Sorry to needle Curtin’s conspiracy bubble, but the piece in question was never removed from our site, nor was it quarantined due to its critique of the criminal CIA.

A simple Google search would have provided Curtin his answer, so to would have a visit to our Recent Articles page, the second most popular page on the site following our main page. The piece also remained on his author page, as it does to this day.

We’d love for Edward “Punching at Shadows” Curtin to issue a correction, but we aren’t counting on it.

Your humble editors,

-Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net and trolled on Twitter @JSCCounterPunch. Joshua Frank is managing editor of CounterPunch. He can be reached at joshua@counterpunch.org. You can follow him on Twitter @joshua__frank.