SINCE Sept. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. Our lives.  Thus, we did not publish the controversial 'Mohammed Cartoons' out of fear that our heads might become divorced from our necks.  See how discrete we can be?

Last week our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials and even cut-and-run Democrats to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry  calls of "treason" and proposals that journalists be jailed along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these.  How rude.

We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country.

Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country's security. That's why we have agreed on this one guiding principle: President Bush must be defeated at all costs.  Because President Bush is the greatest threat to national security, we believe it is our right--no, our duty--to reveal to the public just how dangerous he is. We will put our reporters--not us, hell, we both have bodyguards-- at risk for the greater good of removing Bush.  It's called sacrifice people. 

We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not very many, but a few.  Okay, actually, we prefer to use Arab stringers in the field.  See, that's how much we care about our reporters.  Occasionally we find a ballsy reporters who will risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. Yeah, we had to go outside our own papers to the rival publication accusing us of treason as an example of good-solid journalism---but he was a journalist.  We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism. No, we're actually rooting for the other side.  In this war  between evil and the lesser-of-two-evils, clearly the Jew-controlled neocon cabal is a greater threat to us.  Wait, did we just say that out loud?  Shit.  Note to selves: turn on internal dialogue.

Sure, the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. They don't really want to 'kill us', or 'force us to change our foreign policy', or 'establish a Taliban-like state in Iraq as a first step towards the greater Islamic Caliphate' as our fascist right-wing opponents claim.  No, what the terrorists really want is for Americans to put informants who give away national secrets and the journalists that expose them in jail.  Don't you get it?

If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, well then they can just go take a flying-fuck off a bridge.  We know what secrets you should know, not your democratically elected governments (which really wasn't 'elected' anyway, since Bush stole it).  If  you tell us we don't have the moral authority to declassify sensitive information for public consumption, the terrorists have already won.

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."

We found a quote by a guy on the Supreme Court that seems to make our argument more authoritative, so stuff that in your pipe and smoke it Rethuglicans!

As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government's passion for secrecy and the press's drive to reveal is not of recent origin. Hell, don't you people remember that great hero of WWII, Tokyo Rose?  This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate in the aftermath of our relentless campaign to polarize the electorate and the daunting challenge of so-called 'war on terrorism' have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote.  Which was, like, a little over 30 years ago.  As far back as we can remember.  Almost all the way back to the beginning of history when TV was invented.

Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will convince them that the war on terror is a front orchestrated by American Taliban to take away our civil liberties and murder the children of the poor through the back-door draft.

In recent years our papers have hyped up a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know — classified secrets about the fake intelligence the neocons used to deceive the country into war with Iraq; about the taunting, name-calling, forced panty-wearing, fake Koran flushings, and other unspeakable horrors of torture perpetrated against prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan; about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture; and about eavesdropping on international phone calls without warrants.

Since we aren't really all that bright, we're going to throw in another quote by another liberal journalist to make it seem like our arguments are more persuasive than they really are: As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, asked recently in the pages of that newspaper: "You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?"

Respect our authorite!

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their 'secrets', and yet they want us to trumpet their successes.  Only newspapers, not governments, are allowed to have secrets.  You have no right to know who leaked this information or what their motivations might have possibly been.  That's a real secret not worth knowing.  Trust us.  We know the difference between secrets and 'secrets'.  See, we put these cool little thingies ' '--what are they? they're not quotation marks, but almost--around things that the government should tell you but won't vs. not putting these little thingies ' ' around honest-to-goodness cross-my-heart secrets.  Sorry, about having to explain the difference between secrets and 'secrets' to you, but we don't think much of the average intelligence in flyover country.

A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was shocked, shocked-I-tell-you, by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal (see how we keep dropping the WSJ name into this?  Clever, aren't we?) and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department's efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary's team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration's relentlessness against the terrorist threat.  They didn't really reveal anything secret to us.  Or any of the specifics of the methods they used.  But they should have.  Hypocrites.

How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct to protect?