Midday Monday, ABC News’ Brian Ross posted a short, insiderish item entitled, “Secret U.S. Task Force 145 Secretly Changes Its Name, Again.”
“The super-secret U.S. Task Force 145 had already changed its number call sign before its highly publicized killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq last week,” Ross reported at The Blotter (which is the ABC investigative team’s online outlet for quick news items “meant to be our take on the old-fashioned police blotter, where events of note were recorded as they unfolded”).
The task force’s new number “will not be made public,” Ross wrote, as “U.S. military officials in Baghdad tell ABC News that the elite task force dislikes publicity and wants to keep even its task force number secret.”
Ross went on to give a brief history of the group, which is “made up of elite U.S. military forces, including personnel from the U.S. Navy Seal Team 6, Delta Force and Army Rangers” and even the British SAS. Besides its takedown of Zarqawi, the group “successfully tracked and killed Saddam Hussein’s two sons, Uday and Qusay,” and the moniker “Task Force 145” was no less than the unit’s sixth name.
The post contained the sort of behind-the-scenes details journalists and people in Washington might love — and brought a torrent of reflexive, overheated responses from readers eviscerating ABC for its supposed stupidity and lack of patriotism.
“In case you have not figured it out, radio call signs are changed frequently to hinder the enemy from gleaning intelligence data from intercepted radio transmissions. So, how many lives are you jeopardizing by publishing this data?” wrote one reader. “You must stop publishing operational security info,” posted another. “Why bother digging for secret call signs?” asked yet another reader, who added: “Why not just put a target sign on their backs for the enemy to find? What are you stupid?”
“ABC, you are idiots and VERY unpatriotic!” commented a fourth reader. “Your reporting is just as bad now as it was during the last presidential election coverage. BIASED!!!” “How do you sleep at night?” added another poster. “Have you ever considered the number of lives lost that you are personally responsible for?”
A commenter named Emma Morrow topped them all, however. “What the HELL is wrong with you media people?!?” she wrote. “You would risk the lives of your OWN MOTHERS for the slimmest of headlines!”
Fortunately, some readers actually thought before putting finger to keyboard.
Given the elite units under consideration, observed someone called taskerfive, “nobody is going to know anything about them that isn’t supposed to be known. The call sign info came from the military higher-ups, I’m sure (for PR no doubt).”
“Everyone is freaking out that ABC published something that would hurt the U.S. troops in Task Force 145, yet I see no ‘secret’ information in this article of any kind,” opined a user calling himself Scott. “They simply named unit numbers that are no longer in any use of any kind — the new name for the task force was not given, and there was no information pertaining to any sort of current mission for the task force listed in this article.”
“What I see is simple public knowledge,” Scott concluded. “Get over it.”
Indeed, as a commenter named Charlie who claimed to be a veteran war reporter pointed out, “far more extensive information on Task Force 145” was published by Army Times in a recent story.
ABC might make a tempting, high-profile target for Web surfers looking to add more vitriol to our already-polluted public dialogue, but in this case the angry readers cited above are simply wrong.
Get over it.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.