The American Spectator

/p> p> TREASONOUS TIMES br> Re: David Yerushalmi’s The Worst of the Times : /p>

Many thanks to David Yerushalmi for writing this and to The American Spectator for publishing it. I was of course aware of the debate over the legality of the NSA program and of the clearly illegal (in my view) actions of the persons who leaked the fact of its existence. But this is the first I’ve seen of the Espionage Act being brought into the mix, at least with respect to the publishing angle. The language of the two sections of the Act quoted by the author seem straightforward, unambiguous, crystal clear, against which the actions of Messrs. Sulzberger and Keller seem quite damning. Lots of people, including me, think that what the NYT did was traitorous; the language of the Act seems to confirm it. Moreover, unlike the Pentagon Papers, which if I remember correctly dealt with the history of how we got involved in the Vietnam War, as opposed to the strategy and tactics we were then employing to try to win it, the situation here seems to be a clear-cut case of revealing a current tactic of battle in a time of war, not fundamentally different than if during World War II somebody on the Allied side had revealed to the Germans that we had captured and cracked the secret to their Enigma machine, or had revealed to the Japanese that we had cracked their military code.

p>I hope the administration will bring charges against the Times . I would like to see this tested in court. More important, I believe this needs to be resolved — now, before any further buildup of our enemies’ arsenal of nightmarish weapons. br> — Charles R. Vail br> Glenolden, Pennsylvania /p>