The Pentagon's firing of Stars and Stripes ombudsman Jacqueline Smith reached its seventh business day Monday with no replacement appointment, no public review of the deputy-secretary directive that triggered her dissent, and no Defense Department response to the April 15 letter from Rep. Jamie Raskin and forty-six House colleagues citing "great alarm" over editorial interference. [1] Smith's last day in the role was set for April 28 after she was told the action "is not grievable"; the position was created by Congress in 1991 specifically to prevent the kind of post-Iran-Contra editorial suppression the firing now restores. [2]

The institutional inversion is the story. Congress designed the ombudsman in response to multiple late-1980s episodes in which military officials suppressed Stars and Stripes reporting on the Iran-Contra affair and other politically inconvenient stories. Smith was fired six days after a letter from Congress voiced concerns that the same thing was being done again. [3] Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has framed the editorial overhaul around "no more woke content" and "a focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality"; the March 9 directive from Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg banned the use of "news stories, features, syndicated columns, comic strips and editorial cartoons from commercial news media."

The paper of the soldier becomes the paper of the secretary on the same Monday the Pope names the press dead in war zones at his Regina Caeli. The press-freedom ledger this paper has kept since the war began has Stars and Stripes on it now, alongside the Pentagon Minab silence, the CBS Radio sign-off, and the ABC license cliff. The ombudsman is a small paragraph in a large book.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin