The New York Times has released an
unending series of what appear to be national security secrets for the
past eight years. Most recently the Times released reports of a secret
presidential authorization to attack terrorists in any country without
diplomatic contact first.
The first question most people ask is 'why doesn't our government sue the NYTimes and put the top management in prison for treason?' That question reflects good moral thinking and patriotic values.
The problem is that national security secrets have a strange quality. Most intelligence agencies are never short of information about other countries, friendly and hostile. The inherent nature of intelligence agencies is that they simply can't distinguish good information from bad.
Intelligence agencies spend 90% of their time and resources trying to sort information into categories of: trivial, wrong, deliberately wrong, useful and very important. By letting the NYTimes publish real secrets along with deliberately false secrets and ignoring the Times, our government is simply making the job of foreign and hostile intelligence agencies more difficult. Suing the Times would help categorize information into 'very important.'
On the other hand if the civilian readers of the NY Times believe what they read in the Times...who cares? I don't trust the Times for anything, even their page numbers. Doonesbury is just as accurate as the Times and the Doonesbury bias is always worn on his sleeve.