COMMENTARY | Fox News has published the name, photo, hometown, age and other identifying information of the author of “No Easy Day,” a book written anonymously by one of the six Navy SEALs who accomplished the daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Justifying the release of information about Mark Owen (the pen name used), Fox News claimed: “Once you write a book, anonymously or not, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy,” reports Mediaite.
Owens had protected his privacy for obvious safety reasons, and those reasons bore fruit as jihadist sites have started to put up his picture, along with calls for his “destruction.”
A man who risked his life for his country, who aided in a raid worthy of Hollywood — bringing down one of our most dangerous enemies — must now risk his life on daily basis, thanks to Fox News.
It is not clear how Fox News obtained the information.
What is clear is that, with this information now appearing on websites NBC reports are linked to Al-Qaida, and his image along with captions like “First Image of One of the Dogs Who Killed Bin Laden,” according to the Atlantic Wire, Fox has made it a lot easier for people who may want to find and kill him to find and kill him.
It’s not often you trot out the definition of treason and the assorted other related crimes, and yet, on top of a judge in Texas warning of a civil war if President Barack Obama is re-elected, and a group in Virginia calling for an armed uprising, we have a major network handing sensitive information directly to our enemies.
Here is the statute: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”
Here’s the part that seems relevant: “…adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere….”
Does painting an enormous target on the back of one of our very own service members, a big, red target with details to make the finding easier, constitute aid to our enemies? It would be difficult for anyone to reasonably argue that Fox News didn’t know that releasing Owen’s real name, picture, age and hometown — when all of that information was deliberately withheld — would make it easier to find him.
Did Fox News want to make it easier for Al-Qaida operatives, enemies of our nation, to find him?
We’ve reached an incredibly tumultuous point in our history, with the Right’s loyalty to our government considered secondary to the vilification of the Obama Administration by any means possible.
Apparently, even if it means putting the life of an American hero at risk.
No doubt that Fox News will find a way to try to blame the president for its own disclosure, no doubt that somehow, it will find a means to point the finger away from itself, no matter how much it doesn’t want to bend.
But if this man’s life is ended by some smug news executives with an agenda that never sleeps, never has mercy, Fox News will have real blood — not metaphorical, not hypothetical, literal blood — on its hands.
