The news has been reporting for the last day or so on the plight of young Harry Windsor, Prince of Whateverthefuck and one of the few members of the British royal family who doesn’t turn your stomach merely by existing [oops - yes he is]. Bowing to his family’s destiny, Harry joined the Army, but it was made clear that his royal arse was much too precious ever to be exposed to combat. Legitimately, also, there were fears that the knowledge of his presence in a combat theater would subject his unit mates to increased danger as enemies from around the globe fell over each other to take the most exalted scalp since Mountbatten’s. The issue was especially poignant given the British Army’s long and less-than-exalted history in Afghanistan.

To his credit, he complained of being kept back, going so far as to threaten to resign his comission if he wasn’t allowed to play a full role. He was eventually shipped over - spending most of his time in a behind-the-lines role, but also going on patrols with his air-cav unit. The British press were briefed on his participation, under “embargo” conditions (they agree not to publish the information until given permission, in return for being informed). For less than three months, Harry was in the combat theater, if not exactly in frequent combat, and things were going OK.

Yesterday, Matt Drudge revealed these facts, and within 24 hours Harry was homeward-bound. It seems likely that Drudge was not subject to the embargo - that is, he did not personally agree to its terms - but likely got a leak and chose to publish the information anyway. That he was, in actual effect, working to get a prince of the British royal succession, and soldiers of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, killed, was apparently not a reason in his mind not to do so.

The [British] Defense Ministry announced Friday that Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, would have to come home from Afghanistan because it was too risky for him to stay there.

The prince, 23, has been in Helmand Province with the British Army since December with the knowledge of most of the British news media, who agreed to keep the news secret for security reasons. Details of his deployment became widely known only when they were reported by the Drudge Report on Thursday and the British media decided that the agreement was off.

This is hardly an unusual incident. Responsible journalists, as well as the likes of Drudge, have to deal with questions of the consequences of revealing unknown information every day. Often, secrets are revealed, even in contravention of legal restrictions on access to the information in question. Often, too, that turns out to be the right thing to do. And it could hardly be argued that affairs of great moment hung in the balance in this case; I suppose some people care to read about Harry playing soldier, and the harm done by the revelation is merely that he has to stop playing.

But there’s something interesting about this leak. Drudge took it on himself to reveal operational information about an individual soldier - information that, not merely potentially, but in all foreseeable likelihood, would expose both him and his unit-mates to a considerable increased risk of attack - information the Defense Ministry considered so sensitive that they (perhaps over-protectively) felt they had to pull him from the region to protect his life after it was printed. And those fears, however much prompted by monarchist hypersensitivity, seem perfectly credible. And there was no good reason for it. 

Drudge put a soldier and his mates in danger in order to publish a “scoop” that had no bearing at all on any issue of justifying significance. The story says nothing about any of the underlying controversies regarding the war - it was published for no reason than to gain attention for himself and to satisfy a superficial interest in the doings of celebrities.

Small as the issue is, in terms of justification it goes far beyond stories about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or the Bush administration’s other abuses. Those stories revealed torture, sexual abuse, war crimes, and other systematic and secret crimes so repulsive that they had to be brought to light, because no decent nation can allow such crimes to go unknown or unremarked. The sources and writers who brought those stories forward are heroes, the more so where they had to defy secrecy and the legal strictures of the abusive regime to do it. And they were universally vilified for it, by Drudge himself and the other slime-crawlers of the right wing.

Those who told the truth about the Bush regime’s abuses and crimes were called “traitors”, threatened with prison, in some cases (still ongoing) actually imprisoned without warrant or charge. Foreign news sources were shot to death in Baghdad and their headquarters targeted by bombs and artillery. The right wing has howled incessantly at the revelation of their crimes, and fought for whatever restrictions and punishments they could impose on those who revealed them. But none of the reporting on the war has exposed secret information about actual troop deployments, and certainly never for the shallow purpose of filling celebrity gossip columns. Here Drudge ramps up real danger of combat casualties for one particular unit for no reason other than prurient interest in celebrity.

So - will we see him called a “traitor to the coalition”? Will be be shunned, vilified, harassed, imprisoned, or merely calumniated by howling mobs of his own imitators? Will anyone note that his providing prospective targeting information to the enemy makes him “objectively pro-Taliban”, as was said of those who merely told the truth about US crimes long after the fact? Is Drudge’s knowlingly telling the enemy where to find one of their most hated, high-value targets going to get any criticism - to say nothing of the kind of treatment given those who told truths about things that must not be allowed to stay hidden, long after the fact? I’m sure the right wing will demonstrate its traditional allegiance to principle, and the welfare of combat troops, in this case as in others.