Leaks, Lies, & Libya: How Not To Inform A Nation

While the current administration has strayed far from Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign promise that it would be the most transparent government in history, nothing so points to its failure to keep that promise as have events of the past two years.

Starting with the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the Obama administration has, in a very real sense, “informed” Americans of current events via selective and random leaks (many of them apparently unintentional). For example, on the day after the bin Laden mission, both the president and the vice president identified SEAL Team 6 as the unit executing the mission.

One might call this a “leak in plain sight,” but a leak it was, carrying with it every negative connotation in the word. From the perspective of my military mind, the identification of a specific unit as responsible for the death of bin Laden should, if it ever happened at all, have been the result of intelligence-gathering of the highest order on the part of America’s al-Qaeda enemy. That information surely should not have been provided “free of charge” by the nation’s commander-in-chief.

What damage, one asks, did the release of that information cause to the national defense? One of the principal elements of information on the enemy, I was always taught, was the identification of the unit with which one was in closest contact (the technical term for this is “order of battle”). This is the most important element of the quintessential “know-your-enemy” adjuration. Armed with this gem of knowledge, one is enabled to exact revenge upon or counter future attacks by an enemy.

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