I’m not in the least surprised to hear that the SEAL team had orders to kill, not capture Osama bin Laden. But I’m also not going to believe it just yet.

According to the AP, the new SEAL memoir says that the Obama administration lied about whether the team was given capture orders. The memoir also says that no one on the SEAL team is an Obama supporter, alongside several other tidbits quoted by the AP that would make good fodder as GOP talking points.

Here’s where I have questions: I consider it somewhat convenient that this kind of information would hit the airwaves in the pre-election window. In fairness, though, the AP reports that the book was originally pegged to a 9/11 publication date, which strikes me as an excellent, although tasteless, marketing ploy.

It’s remarkably unclear from the piece whether the AP has an advance copy of the book, or whether they’re quoting a Dutton press release. It states, “The Associated Press purchased a copy of the book Tuesday.” But the book isn’t available until 9/1, and advance press copies aren’t typically for sale—so are they working with an advance copy? Had they said nothing, I’d assume they were, as I’d assume that the AP would be on the gratis list. But since it’s also news that the DoD is only now getting their advance copies, this is a bit odd.

This might be a bit too inside-baseball, but the difference is this: give the AP an advance copy, and you’ve got 330 pages of book that could conceivably generate a headline. Give them and others a press release only, and then you’ve got a much better chance of dictating what headlines are going to make the news. People marketing the book won’t much care either way, as both will sell copies. People caring about framing the political message are definitely going to prefer the latter.

In any case, what’s really confusing me is this: I’m one of the people who are happy to hear that Obama might have ordered bin Laden’s capture, because I believe bin Laden was a criminal. But this puts me into a remarkably small focus group of Americans—so there is damned little to gain politically by the Obama administration to appeal to me, especially since just about everyone in that cohort is going to lean Democratic for many other reasons.

Sounds to me like we’re about to hear a shitstorm of attacks on the Obama administration for lying to appeal to people like me. Which the Obama administration doesn’t normally care about doing. And that’s the biggest reason why this headline is striking me as bullshit.