On Thursday, Fox News outed the identity of a Navy SEAL who co-wrote a book on the Osama bin Laden raid. I won't link you to the article nor will I tell you the name they published, but their abject evil in promoting the OpSec group as endangering
August 25, 2012

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On Thursday, Fox News outed the identity of a Navy SEAL who co-wrote a book on the Osama bin Laden raid. I won't link you to the article nor will I tell you the name they published, but their abject evil in promoting the OpSec group as endangering national security while outing the name of one of the people actually involved in the mission should be obvious.

Today, Fox News should be concerned about national security all over again, and their role in endangering it. Via Think Progress, this news:

NBC News reports that users on websites affiliated with al-Qaeda have posted the name and photo of an American Navy SEAL who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The New York Times reported this week that the SEAL, writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen, wrote a book documenting the events of the raid — news that came as a surprise to the industryand even the U.S. government.

There's a line somewhere in all of this that shouldn't be crossed. I'm all for transparency, but not when it endangers someone else's life. Valerie Plame's outing should have been enough for all of us to understand.

That's probably true unless you're Fox News and you have a deep vested interest in: a) electing Mitt Romney president; and b) promoting the agendas of Republican retired military operatives who want to elect Mitt Romney. In their bloodlust, they thought nothing of publishing the name of someone who served their country and risked his life to do it.

To Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News hacks, it's all abstract. They don't think about what it actually is like to be the guy facing threats from actual real enemies. It's a game to them, something to use for partisan hackery. Strange how that wasn't the case just over a year ago when they took Gawker to task.

“This whole business of exposing people is a real serious matter. It’s not entertainment, some people may think it is, but it’s not … There are real people out there that are going to be killed because of this,” said Charles Faddis, a former CIA operations officer who spent 20 years working international hot spots and who headed the CIA’s Terrorist Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit before retiring in 2008.

It's times like these when I remind myself that I don't approve of waterboarding people.

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