Advisor associated with the U.S. Army want their name removed from the text of a published article I have been contacted by an individual with a request to remove their name from an article our journal published two years ago. The individual was identified as a Culture and Foreign Language Advisor of the U.S. Army; their post location (city) was also mentioned. This person claims that the author of this article did not asked their permission to include their name in the article, and did not give informed consent to do so. 

Is this a valid request? I mean, it may be valid ethically as it may put this person and their relatives at risk, by associating their name with a military program, but since two years have passed since publication and our journal is open-access, this article has been archived on a number of other sites we do not control. So, the info is already out there, no matter how we proceed. Do you think this is also a legal problem? (The journal is located in Central Europe)
This seems like an unreasonable request to me. The copyright to the text rests with the publisher, and the "moral rights" with the authors of the paper. I don't think anyone who is mentioned in the article has a legal right to request removal from the article. Certainly, this would morally require consent from the authors.

In general, I do not think that there is a legal right to not have one's name mentioned unless that violates state secrecy rights (think, the name "Valerie Plame" appearing in newspaper articles about the CIA). If the local newspaper mentioned my name in the context of the local cycling club, then this seems to me to be a fair use of their journalistic priviledge that I can not reasonably challenge.