TIME SERVED.(The Talk of the Town)(FBI tears out letters to the editor in magazine received by shoe bomber Richard Reid in prison)

Some months ago, Betty Satterwhite, who edits the letters section at Time, got a call from a federal defender in Boston who was representing Richard Reid, the infamous shoe bomber, in a court appeal. Reid, it turned out, was a devoted Time reader, but he'd been having a little trouble with his subscription. As he awaited sentencing at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute, he began receiving peculiarly abridged editions of the magazine: the letters to the editor were always missing, as though they'd been torn out.

In fact, they had--by F.B.I. agents responding to a series of "special administrative measures" issued by the Attorney General. Late last month, a federal court dismissed Reid's ongoing appeal to retrieve his missing Time letters. This may not seem a great loss, but shouldn't Reid, as a paying customer, be entitled to see the entire magazine, including the feedback provided by the likes of Jennifer Barnard, of Apple Valley, California? ("I am nine months pregnant, and I was totally mesmerized by your report. The pictures of a baby's brain, heart, stomach, umbilical cord and other major organs were amazing.") The problem, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Katzmann, is this: Al Qaeda training manuals advocate sending coded messages through innocent-seeming media, and Reid is a confessed Al Qaeda member. "With the receipt of unfiltered materials," Katzmann said, "the concern is that somebody trained in code could send a communication through unfiltered avenues which contain hidden messages."

Reid's lawyers decided to challenge the "unfiltered" component of this formulation, which led them, eventually, to Betty Satterwhite. "Basically, for letters to be even considered for publication they have to be relevant to something we printed," Satterwhite explained last week. "So that excludes a whole lot of mail right off the bat." About fifty letters arrive each month, for instance, from prisoners requesting legal assistance or seeking to publicize the details of their cases. Satterwhite replies to these with a form letter.

"All told, we get around twelve hundred potentially publishable letters--things that are actually in English and relevant--in a given week," Satterwhite continued. "Of those, about twenty-five"--or two per cent--"are published." The selected letters are then heavily edited for space and ...