Navy Seals Keeping Secrets

Matt Bissonnette was on 60 Minutes last week;  the story of Robert O'neill is in Time this week [http://time.com/3574990/navy-seals-rober-oneill-osama-bin-laden/];  and, of course, we have the movie.  [See Judicial Watch Website at http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/13421/ 
for the movie making story]  

These are all about killing Osama Bin Laden.  To me, the issue isn't about who killed him, but more about why they are talking about what happened, or how details of what happened managed to find their way into the press.  There are many parts to this story.

Matt Bissonnette has been getting most of the press on this because he published a book - without getting public release permission.  After going through  this process myself last week, it is a good time to remind everyone with an SCI clearance that the government has a job and that is to review books before they are published to make sure they don't have classified material in them.  They aren't reviewing it for policy unless you still work for the government, and they are pretty liberal on what they approve (if you consider that almost anything written down has been classified by somebody, in some context).  Most of them show sense in what they don't approve.

This isn't as easy as it sounds, and mine took from August 26 to November 04 to get done.  When you consider it is 100,000 words, that probably isn't too bad.  They redacted a few things but really not anything big.  Bissonnette says his lawyers said he didn't have to and he is suing those guys for that advice, but anyone who ever had a security briefing is pretty clear on what was said about the subject.

Still, a boatload of people talk to the press, write all kinds of things, and never submit any of it for public release.  University professors are my favorite targets here.  Bissonnette tried to say that all kinds of Generals and Secretaries of Defense wrote books and he should be able to do the same.  They got public release for theirs and they have the footnotes to prove it.

Seal Teams and other special operations folks should not be talking to the press about their missions.  Each time they do (like the one when they talked to the makers of a video game about some operational capabilities and got disciplined for it) little things leak out.  Those little things allow an adversary to pick up techniques to make sure they won't be doing that again.  This seems to be just as easy for the White House to do as it was for the operational folks who briefed the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, one of my all-time favorite films.  We can bet nobody had to clear that film for public release.  It was a great movie, but it is, as the White House would say, a movie and not an account of what actually happened.

What I don't like was DoD trying to make a deal with Bissonnette's lawyers and then having the Justice Department prosecute him anyway.  Either way, the guy gets no money from his book.  For pure discouragement of people publishing books without going through public release, the DoD deal would have been equally effective.  Justice should have stayed out of it, but that is not their style.  Now he can sue the legal offices for their advice, and get his money anyway.  Maybe that is why they call it the Justice Department.