The lede publishes the shameful leak in summary form.

Israel set up a clandestine military outpost in the Iraqi desert to support its air campaign against Iran and launched airstrikes against Iraqi troops who almost discovered it early in the war, people familiar with the matter including US officials said.

Who leaked this stuff? Those US officials and people familiar need to be identified and prosecuted for their mishandling of classified material. This sort of leak damages our nation’s and Israel’s national security, revealing as it does critical, secret operations and methods and techniques each of our two nations employ in the pursuit of defeating our enemies. It also unnecessarily embarrasses another nation, making this sort of operation more difficult to set up and execute in the future. That, in turn, makes our prosecuting the next war we’re forced to fight even more expensive in treasure, equipment, and lives.

To what end? What material good comes from publishing these leaks? Yes, yes, we all have a right to know, but at what cost does the knowing right damn now come? The primary gain in the immediacy is just clicks and status for journalists and their publishers for being the ones to publish.

The press does get to print this stuff, as irresponsible as publishing national secrets is, because the Ellsberg case involving the unauthorized leak (pardon the redundancy) of the Pentagon Papers made legal the receipt of and profit from that receipt of stolen goods, as long as the receiver/publisher is a press outlet.

But the leaks that get such information into the hands of an irresponsible press remain illegal, and the ones doing the leaking are still criminal by their leaking. They need to be prosecuted vigorously and sanctioned heavily.