It may not be a popular or politically correct thing to say – though I’ve never courted popularity or embraced political correctness – but the editors and reporters at the New York Times ought to go to be put to death for their crimes against this country. The reporting of classified information about covert operations against terrorism – including the CIA’s secret prisons, the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, and the effort to monitor terrorist banking transactions through SWIFT are crimes against this nation at least as great as those of Aldrich Ames or the Rosenbergs. In reporting these vital national secrets, the media – and it’s not just the Times, I’ll add, they’re merely the worst offenders – are virtually acting as spies on behalf of our enemies.

This is not a lawless call for vigilante justice. Rather, it is a call that for the laws of the land to be faithfully executed. Section 794 of Title 18 of the United States Code provides that (and I’m going to quote at length here):

Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life.

The act further goes on to add that the death penalty shall only be imposed under certain conditions, among them that the information transmitted concerned, “communications intelligence or cryptographic information; or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy.”

Regardless of the phony reasons that reporters can drum up to justify their actions, there’s little cause to deny that the reporters and editors in question have obviously and directly violated this law. They were well aware (indeed, they had been informed at the highest level) that this was vital secret information related to the defense of the United States. They didn’t care. They published it anyways. It’s time to remind the press that they are not above the law.

Some may claim that my proposal would violate the First Amendment. Nonsense. The First Amendment is designed to protect the freedom of the press. At the most, it protects reporters from prior government censorship of their works or from laws designed to target them in particular. It does not exempt them from laws applicable to the general public. It does not give them the right to expose vital national secrets.

Blinded by their hatred of the Bush Administration and the Global War on Terrorism, reporters and editors at the Times and other papers have done something terrible. They must, if there is any justice in the world, now be made to pay a terrible price for their crimes.

In the modern era the media has come to think of itself as some kind of supra-national institution, free from the obligation to obey the laws of the land. They think of themselves as citizens of the world with no obligation to their country. The time has come to remind them that the reality is otherwise.

Can there be little doubt that, if they were transported back to the Second World War, the modern media would have exposed vital (and war-winning) secrets like Enigma, the plans for the Normandy invasion, and the existence of the Atomic Bomb? Such actions don’t serve the “public right to know” nearly so much as they serve the interests of our enemies.

The media has sinned grievously –and now grievously must the answer for those sins.