The New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have taken the position that government employees are somehow do-gooders or heroic whistle-blowers when they disclose to the media secrets the media wishes to publish.

On several previous occasions I have written about the treasonous behavior of the New York Times in illegally obtaining top secret information and then publishing it to the world, including to our enemies (see, e.g., here and here). After the Times story on the electronic surveillance program operated by the National Security Agency was run on December 16, 2005, the Washington Post ran its own story about the alleged “black site” prisons located in foreign countries (presumably in Europe) operated by the CIA to hold suspected Islamic terrorists waging a campaign of worldwide terror against the US and the West. That story is now front and center because of the allegation that a senior CIA analyst with heavy ties, including financial ones, to the Democrats and their operatives was the source of the treasonous leaks to Dana Priest, the Post journalist responsible for the story. (As has now been discovered by the blogosphere and not by the Times, Post or other mainstream media outlets, Mrs. Priest’s husband was one of the Democratic Party operatives connected financially to Mrs. McCarthy. Yes, it gets messy in there.)

As is now painfully obvious, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others of the Elites take the position that government employees, who have sworn an oath of secrecy and loyalty to protect the interests of the US and to maintain its secrets, are somehow do-gooders or heroic whistle-blowers when they disclose to the media secrets the media wishes to publish. And, of course the opposite is true. That is, when the leakers disclose secrets the media does not want to publish for whatever reason, the media calls for special prosecutors and for official heads to roll.

When the Times or the Post take this position we are not surprised. That these papers have become political organs of the Left, which in and of itself is not bad since we can always choose to ignore them (as is happening if one judges by circulation), is a sin of the gravest magnitude when their political ideology leads them to conspire with government employees to commit espionage and treason against their own government and country. It would seem obvious to anyone with a shred of intellectual integrity and common sense that treason cannot be justified by virtue of which side of the political fence you, or the media, sit. Treason is treason and must be stopped with the most aggressive prosecution the government can muster.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal has done an admirable job pointing to the hypocrisy of the Times and the Post, whose journalists, absurdly enough, just won Pulitzer Prizes for their articles revealing national security secrets. (It goes without saying that the Prizes are awarded by a “jury” of their peers – media academics and professionals). As the Journal noted in its editorial entitled, “Our Rotten IntelligenCIA,” on the one hand, these media types called for the Plame witch-hunt to uncover and prosecute any government officials who “illegally disclosed” Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA status, but on the other hand now demand immunity and whistle-blower status for disclosing real secrets that are directly related to our war against terror. (All of this is even more Kafkaesque now that the former chief of staff to the vice president, I. Lewis Libby, has been indicted for essentially not remembering all of the details of his conversations with journalists, and the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has all but admitted that he will not take the position that Valerie Plame was a covert agent at the time, a fact without which there is no underlying crime of illegal disclosure. In other words, the whole investigation to determine WHO committed a crime came before they knew WHAT crime was committed.)

For everyone’s benefit, the crime of espionage, as set forth in the Espionage Act is straightforward. It is a crime for any person (typically government officials) who lawfully have knowledge of government secrets to disclose those secrets to unauthorized persons. It is also a crime for those persons who have knowingly acquired government secrets unlawfully to disclose those secrets to any other unauthorized persons. This means quite reasonably that both the leaker and the media outlet which then publishes the secrets are in violation of the Espionage Act and liable for up to 10 years in prison for each violation.

But in the same Wall Street Journal editorial noted above, the paper’s editors take the unbelievable position that while they accept that government leakers are criminals, the journalists and the media that actually publish these illegally acquired national security secrets to our enemies are somehow immune from being held responsible. Hear it for yourselves (because if I didn’t quote them, you wouldn’t believe it):

We've been clear all along that we don't like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job.

What can this possibly mean? Who would not want to prosecute a treasonous leaker and the journalists and editors who conspired to obtain those secrets by entering into confidentiality agreements and then knowlingly publishing those illegally acquired secrets to our enemies? Even setting aside the purely legal question, did they violate federal criminal law or not, knowingly and willingly, is there not a simple moral imperative to protect a nation’s secrets from its enemies? Does national existence not count for anything?

What does it mean to say that a journalist is “just trying to do [his or her] job?” If you define your job as violating the criminal law, you are a professional criminal. What is the job of the press? Is it not fair to say that the job of the press is to inform the public of all of the news “that is fit to print?” If the Times or the Post had been given the information where Anne Frank was hiding, would they have printed it for the world to see? The answer is yes, especially if she had been a Republican. In the case at hand, they have disclosed our security secrets to our enemies and in so doing put real lives at risk.

Thus, according to the Journal/Times/Post logic, media credentials somehow grant the press a license to put the rest of us in danger. Is it really the Journal’s position that newspaper editors are somehow uniquely situated to be above the law and granted the authority to sit in judgment of the secrecy and legality of government programs? Even assuming a given program is arguably illegal, who weighs the danger of disclosure of such top secret programs to our enemies against the harm caused by the illegality of the program? Would we want the editors of al-Jazeera granted the freedom and immunity to publicize our national security secrets under the guise of the “just trying to do their job?”

The editors of the Wall Street Journal must, it seems to me, choose. Either you are with us or against us. You can’t have it both ways. You are either American or you are one of the Elites striving for a borderless, nationless existence. In the Journal’s case, such would be a one-world free market libertarian authority; in the Times’ and Post’s utopia, a one-world social welfare state. I for one reject both. I love this country and do not grant you any license “to just do your job” if that job means violating the Espionage Act and putting my family, my friends and my fellow citizens in harm’s way. End of discussion.