Loyalty yes, but to what?

Loyalty is generally considered a virtue.

Disloyalty is generally considered a vice.

But one must sometimes choose between conflicting loyalties, and one's choices on such occasions go a long way toward defining a person's character.

For instance, a person might have a great love for his or her country, and yet have a greater love for God. If such people hold in their heart a religious belief that war is immoral, then they are granted a conscientious objector status and exempted from combat duty.

Are these people disloyal to the United States? Not at all, but they had to choose between two loyalties and decide which would be paramount. By choosing God over country, they have declared who they are.

In the famous Victor Hugo novel "Les Miserables," another kind of choice is posed. Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. He is a good man who respects the law, but his loyalty to his family prevails. This is the first of many choices Valjean makes, each of which reveals the complexity of his character. Sometimes his loyalty to principle leads him into error, sometimes to salvation.

So it is with all of us.

Thus, we are perhaps wrong to consider loyalty in itself a virtue. It is instead a test of virtue. We are all loyal by nature to something - family, country, god, self - and usually to many things. How we sort these loyalties out provides a kind of snapshot of the soul. That which we are loyal to, and that which we betray - what better way to take the estimation of a man?

I broach this philosophical matter at the start of my weekly column because I am about to be disloyal - to my profession.

It seems that many journalists have decided - based partly on expediency and no doubt partly on altruism - that they have the right to print anything, and especially anything which involves the government.

While this principle works well in general, it should not - in my opinion - be universally applied. There are frequently matters discussed in the corridors of power which should not be aired publicly, and for a variety of reasons.

One of the most self-evident is seen in the government's role as criminal investigator. Allegations of wrongdoing are often brought before local police, sheriffs or the FBI, but not until the allegations have been investigated or otherwise substantiated should they be considered fair game for journalists.

But, of course, reporters do on occasion get word of some juicy scandal or police investigation that seems to be of immense popular interest, but with just one problem - the police aren't sure of all the facts yet, or aren't ready to make an arrest.

On the local front, not too long ago, a wealthy businessman was accused of soliciting prostitution and other crimes. This newspaper was aware of the investigation months before any charges were filed. You could make the case that our readers had an interest in knowing what their government was doing, and also had an interest in knowing that a potential predator was in the community, but yet the Inter Lake did not publish any stories about this matter until such time as the warrants were served and the police were ready to make their case.

Were we disloyal to our readers? Were we disloyal to journalism? Or were we loyal to standards of fairness, decency and good citizenship? I would argue the latter.

Unfortunately, in the age of pack journalism, where getting the red meat - er, I mean the story - first is so important, sometimes those standards are forgotten.

Everyone remembers the case of the Atlanta security guard who was vilified by the press as the Olympic bomber when he was in fact the Olympic bombing hero. Such cases would be repeated many times over were the press to have untrammeled access to all of the false accusations made in police stations every day.

On a much grander scale, the government protects not just reputations but also our very lives when it keeps secret a variety of classified information gathered in the course of intelligence-gathering and spying. And of course it also keeps secret the programs through which this classified information is gathered, in order to prevent the enemies of this nation from learning how we watch them.

In times past, such top-secret information had been considered unprintable. The elected and representative members of our government were entrusted by the body politic with the grave responsibility of doing the work of protecting the public in whatever way was deemed necessary. The idea of violating that trust would at one time have been considered treasonous, especially if it aided an external enemy of the state.

But today, reporting on secret government programs has become something of a competitive sport for the mainstream media. USA Today revealed the existence of a National Security Agency program to track terrorists by analyzing calling patterns in a massive database of phone records. The New York Times wrote an earlier story revealing the existence of a program to eavesdrop on telephone and e-mail communications between people in the United States and those abroad - again meant to locate terrorists and prevent them from killing people.

People use a variety of justifications for printing these stories, often falling back on the "freedom of the press" guaranteed by the First Amendment. But like all freedoms, this one is not absolute, but includes certain responsibilities. Thus we have laws against libel to protect reputations from being smeared with false information, and we have common sense - which ought to prevent publishing some information (whether true or not) because it will harm individuals or the nation beyond any value to be found in the story itself.

As I say, not everyone in my profession agrees with me. Not even everyone in my own newsroom agrees with me. Indeed, since the Pentagon Papers and Woodward and Bernstein, the Fourth Estate - the unofficial outsider component of government - largely considers itself exempt from any "checks and balances." It is a power unto itself like Milton's self-deluded Satan, who declares, "We know no time when we were not as now;/ Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised/ By our own quickening power…"

But Satan discovered that pride cometh before a fall, and likewise the press could very easily overplay its proud claims of independence and anger the public, which ultimately is the keeper of all power in our system. Indeed, the public does appear to be stirring recently, in the wake of yet another New York Times story, this one telling how the federal government has - through legal means - been monitoring the records of a banking information broker in Belgium in order to track financial transactions used to fund terrorism activities worldwide.

Other newspapers then followed suit, but it is improbable the story would have surfaced at all had it not been for the Times' insistence on ferreting out any and all secret anti-terrorism programs and revealing them to the public no matter how crucial they may be to national security.

Reading the original story by the Times is a somewhat surreal experience, consistent with watching Anthony Hopkins lick his lips at the thought of fava beans in "Silence of the Lambs." Just as a serial killer takes pleasure from finding an innocent victim and then draining that victim of hope and ultimately life, so too does the New York Times revel in its capacity to uncover a legal secret program and drain it of any hope of effectiveness to save innocent lives.

The program, as reported by the Times, "is limited… to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to al-Qaida…" and is "viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool." Indeed, the program is credited with helping "in the capture of the most wanted al-Qaida figure in Southeast Asia."

As one former senior counterterrorism official said in the story, "The capability here is awesome, or depending on where you are sitting, troubling." One imagines that if you are sitting in a cave in Pakistan or Afghanistan, plotting to destroy the Sears Tower or smuggle an atomic bomb into Manhattan, it is somewhat troubling. But apparently it is equally troubling if you are sitting in the editor's office at The New York Times.

Indeed, it is hard to understand exactly what The New York Times thought it was accomplishing by revealing this top-secret program except to inform our sworn enemy of one of the most "vital" tools we use to protect ourselves. The only logical explanation is that The New York Times has determined through some self-serving process that transcends loyalty to nation - and apparently eclipses the obligation to save innocent lives - that it has the right to publish any and all information about the government simply because the government works for the public.

It did not matter to The New York Times that the Bush administration, the chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, and even Rep. John Murtha (a sworn opponent of Bush) all pleaded with the newspaper to keep quiet for the good of the country. All that mattered was that the Times had a secret, and doesn't know how to keep one.

As editor Bill Keller said, "We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

A matter of public interest? What? Isn't it more a matter of public interest to preserve and protect one of the most successful programs available to fight terrorism? Doesn't the editor really mean it is a matter of prurient interest? Isn't he really licking his chops like Hannibal the Cannibal - greedy for another bit of bone and gore?

Shouldn't the lead of The New York Times story really have been this: "A formerly highly successful anti-terrorism program conducted in secret by the Bush administration to protect the citizens of this country was crippled today with publication of this story."

Isn't that the real news?

But Keller and his counterpart at the Los Angeles Times wrote a self-defense recently which says, "Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price."

Not a word was uttered by those editors to explain how they balance this "job" with their ability to cripple vital national security programs. Not a word was uttered about what price the country will pay as a result of the New York Times' decision.

These editors are indeed loyal to their job, but whether they are loyal to their country you will have to judge for yourself.

I can, however, tell you one thing. On the off chance that I were ever to learn details of a program that might help to track down and kill Osama bin Laden or any of his murderous thugs, you have my word on this:

My lips are sealed.