AP75,
All valid points, but at the risk of diving too far down this rabbit hole, how do manage the release of this type of information effectively? Do you let the journo's make a detemination of whether critical military capability will be revealed by reporting the full story, do you ask the Taliban whether they already knew that particular Opsec characteristic, or is some overworked Int guy now required to make a security assessment solely for the purpose of allowing the story to be published by the general media?
Does public release justify a whole additional level of scrutiny and vetting for each correspondent's story, instead of the general release provided by the media pool? Maybe it does, but nobody should think that allowing journo's to publish the "truth" from an operational area doesn't carry an associated burden for the Military.