Some dare call it . . .

Treason. That's what Scott Johnson of Power Line says the New York Times's James Risen and Eric Lichtblau got their Pulitzer Prize for.

I wouldn't go that far, though I did raise the issue of whether the government could prosecute them and the Times under the Espionage Act for revealing the National Security Agency surveillance of conversations between suspected terrorists abroad and persons in the United States. Johnson gives a good example of the incoherence of the Times these days, as follows:

Juxtapose the Times's award-winning reportage with the Times's high-minded editorial condemnation of President Bush for allegedly failing to follow proper procedure in declassifying the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate key judgments. Today the Times instructs us: "Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified."

Waving a wand is apparently a prerogative reserved to Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who made the decision to "declassify" the NSA surveillance program in the pages of the Times. According to Keller, the publication of the NSA story did "not expose any technical intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record." Thus Keller waved his wand, and the Times blew the NSA program. Smarter folks than I will have to reconcile the trains of thought at work among the editors of the New York Times.