No easy answers for No Easy Day

The SEAL book secrecy case is hardly clear-cut

No Easy Day
(Image credit: AP Photo/Dutton)

No Easy Day, a Navy SEAL's first-person account of Operation Neptune's Spear, will not, in and of itself, bring harm to the men who compose the National Missions Force of the United States. Having read the book several times and reviewed certain passages with cleared-in military officials, both retired and active-duty, including one person who is given a pseudonym by Matt Bissonnette, it seems clear that the bad guys won't get much out of the book. As one former SEAL remarked to me, "If you want to know about our T[actics] T[echniques] [and] P[roducers], I can give you a dozen video games that [the military] helped out with, and, yeah there was that movie last year [Act of Valor] that gave away more."

A close reader of the book can find a few nuggets that point to information that might be considered classified: The author writes of a 60-pound device that the CIA uses to jam airwaves, insinuates that SEALs had gone into Pakistan several times before the bin Laden raid (this we knew), and reveals the training locations for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group's High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) parachute jumps.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.