First off, I'm all about freedom of the press. Both in principle and from my extremely limited experience in journalism, I believe in a paper's right to publish "all the news that's fit to print." When I was editor of my high school paper, we were censored by the administration and it wasn't much fun. However, it's hard not to cringe when reading the NY Times article on German intelligence assistance in the invasion of Iraq. The pain gets worse when you read the German response and the NYT response it prompted. As a direct result of this article, foreign intelligence agencies will be less likely to share information with the United States. No foreign intelligence service is going to pass on information when there's a reasonable risk of that information and the method by which it was obtained being published in the press.

It's hard to fault The Times for printing such newsworthy information. Even if they had restrained themselves, someone else wouldn't have. The person who needs to be fired is the government employee who leaked the classified document the article was based upon. I'm no fan of bringing in the plumbers to clean up leaks in the government -- I think it allows the executive branch to keep vital information from the public by over classifying documents. That being said, there is a lot of information that were it released would be damaging to national security. Documents are classified for a reason, and releasing them to the press is a crime. Every so often, a document warrants being leaked as a reality check to remind the administration that classifying documents is not a PR tool. This was not one of those cases -- the public's right to know does not outweigh the harm done.

The only cool thing about this, was that it was fun to see military-speak appear somewhere outside of message traffic: CENTCOM, HUMINT, LNO, JFCOM, NEGRES... wait, no NEGRES wasn't in there -- this isn't a CASREP. In other news, I really should be using my time to draft a CASCOR -- which of course would include the word POSRES -- but this is much more fun.