You're not the first to curse the news media for confidential divulging military affairs. General William Sherman once said that if he could, he would hang news reporters for spying.

I can see why he would say that.

TBL, the final exit from Bagdhad is going to look like the exit from Saigon, just not so well planned.  I hope they built the helipads on the embassy roof strong enough--but given the unbelievable war-profiteering in Iraq, I doubt it.

Here we go again with another ill considered media bashing.

Yeah, yeah, the stupid, selfish, rotten, traitorous media just wants to sell more newspapers which cost more to produce than the sales price.

We've heard all this uh, stuff before. It was simplistic then and it's simplistic now.

In this case concerning Prince Harry, the media, including thousands of print and Internet publications and television outlets, agreed to keep the royal kid's deployment secret, and managed to do so for nearly a year until one cheesy Australian magazine finally leaked the information. Not a great example to illustrate the collective media's alleged lack of patriotism and moral fiber.

In fact, thousands of journalists having kept the information quiet for that long is a significant indication of the industry's sensitivity to military matters, especially those which might bring harm to troops or military objectives.

The suggestion that the media is traitorously revealing military secrets is equally as absurd.

I wonder if accusatory media critics ever consider the fact that during wartime, the military regularly and intentionally leaks disinformation and false intelligence through media outlets for strategic purposes?

Does it occur to anyone that a media announced date and time of a military operation might be a counterintelligence move to confuse the enemy and thwart their plans?

The fact is, the media has long proved extremely useful in military intelligence operations.

Has anyone considered that the information regarding Harry's deployment may have been intentionally leaked by parties wishing to get the kid off the battlefield and out of harm's way before he and his buddies were needlessly killed.

Did anyone think the about the resources needed to protect the kid and his platoon mates from targeting by terrorists eager to kill him for maximum advertising exposure and for a better seat at the side of Allah?

Things are not always as they may appear to those unwilling or unable to think deeper inside the box as well as outside of it.

Actually TBL, the Australian (women's) magazine published the information over a month ago, but nobody picked up on it. It wasn't until the "reporter" Matt Drudge posted the "exclusive" (can it be an exclusive if someone else already broke it?) story on his blog that people noticed.

I wouldn't go so far to say that the US withdrawl will be covered in quite that amount of detail, but if you want to see what I think it'll be like, you can look at either the US "pullout" from Vietnam (and random's helicopter analogy), or Russia's pullout from Afghanistan. However it happens, there will be shooting in the streets, but it won't be in anger.......