Disloyal!

Trust: The so-called mainstream media in general and The New York Times in particular are waging a relentless campaign undermining the war on terror. The Fourth Estate is beginning to look like a Fifth Column.

It's hard to imagine a major American newspaper in 1942 announcing before the Battle of Midway that we had broken the Imperial Japanese code or before D-Day that the Allies had a machine that let us read the Nazis' highest-level transmissions.

Yet in the war on terror, that's exactly the kind of information that papers like the Times and The Washington Post, in the name of the "people's right to know," have provided our jihadist enemy -- from stories on secret CIA prisons where our mortal enemies are held to wiretaps on al-Qaida operatives and their U.S. contacts.

Where was the defense of the "people's right to know" when the issue was who "revealed" the name of CIA desk jockey Valerie Plame and her Bush-bashing, mint tea-drinking husband, Joe Wilson? Then the issue was who was placing our covert agents in jeopardy and who should be indicted and sent to federal prison.

But when it comes to the Post disclosing classified information on CIA prisons, which we hope exist, or the Times telling the world that the CIA uses its own airline service, disguised as a private charter company, to move prisoners around, hey, that's Pulitzer Prize material.

Last May, the Times reported in painstaking detail on how "the civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be welcome." These revelations prompted widespread protests in Europe and elsewhere with demands for investigations into and the curtailing of these operations.

It is hard to see how making public this information in the middle of a war helps, say, a housewife in Des Moines. By compromising these weapons in the war on terror, it only places the American people in greater jeopardy. But it's easy to see how this information aids al-Qaida.

The Times finds itself in the unique position of publishing classified information at the same time it insists that terrorists in contact with their operatives in the U.S. have an expectation of privacy while plotting their next attack.

In its Dec. 16 story reporting that the National Security Agency eavesdropped on calls between terrorist suspects abroad and residents of the U.S. -- a practice that is not only legal and constitutional, but also has broken up several terrorist plots -- it alerted al-Qaida that we might be listening in.

As damaging as the story was, its timing was curious, to say the least. If the "people's right to know" was so important, why did the Times sit on the story for a year, only to publish it on the eve of the debate on renewing the Patriot Act, inciting a brouhaha that also drowned out the good news of Iraq's successful and violence-free election of a permanent government?

Sen. John Cornyn (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, says he knows of two senators who decided to vote against renewing the Patriot Act in its present form based on the Times piece. Did the Times intend to strip us of this vital tool in the war on terror by revealing a clandestine, successful operation that has thwarted another 9-11?

We enjoy press and other freedoms only because we have successfully defended our nation from those who would take away our freedoms, and our lives.

But with freedom comes responsibility.