The First Amendment gives The New York Times the right to oppose the Bush administration's war on terror. But it doesn't give the paper the right to undermine it.

And that's exactly what The Times did when it led the journalistic charge that disclosed a secret U.S. Treasury Department program tracing the financial transactions of suspected and real flesh-and-blood terrorists.

What The Times did -- and to a lesser extent The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal -- is much more than to raise a theoretical First Amendment argument. Their stories, I fear, will rob us of a significant weapon in the war on terrorists. If there has been a lower point in American journalism in my lifetime, I can't recall it.

What the self-appointed global security experts at The Times refuse to acknowledge is that the enemy we face is like no other in our history. There are no central standing armies to track, no heavy weapon systems to defend against, no supply lines to cut. The terrorists we fight form anonymous cells. They use everyday items -- fertilizer, box cutters, planes and cars -- to kill us. National boundaries are meaningless; it's technology that binds and finances this horrific movement. Thanks to these press stories, our efforts to track and disrupt the technological supply line have been severely hampered.

The disclosure of the legal, legitimate and restrained use of financial surveillance is akin to outing a covert spy network. But don't count on other news media outlets to call for a special prosecutor as some did with the inconsequential outing of CIA cover girl Valerie Plame. Just as presidents invoke the use of executive privilege to hide their misdeeds, the editors are hiding behind their own self-defined "public interest" theory to justify their damaging work. The arguments they use to fend off the angry backlash the publication of these stories has produced would be laughable if they weren't so consequential.

Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet used a civil liberties defense. But what civil liberty did the paper intend to protect? One can only guess, since Baquet offered only platitudes. His rhetorical, high-minded use of Thomas Jefferson as a beacon of an informed citizenry ignored the fact that our revered third president was not an absolutist. He eloquently argued against slavery while owning slaves. And of course, Baquet invoked the Pentagon Papers case -- misleading, given that those were historical documents, not an ongoing operation.

Ironically, the exhaustive and excellent reporting of the Treasury story by the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau was the best argument against disclosure. They uncovered no criminality, no abuse, no risk to privacy. Quite the opposite. Their work detailed that adequate safeguards are in place. The cold hard fact is that the Treasury Department is meticulously obeying not only the letter but the spirit and intent of the law.

That wasn't good enough for The Times or The Washington Post. Editorially, they lamented the lack of legislative rules and congressional oversight of the program.

Congressional oversight? That's a good one. Aren't these the guys who consider their Capitol Hill offices sanctuaries against legal, warrant-based searches?

I have my own lack-of-rules concern. What were the rules The New York Times and the other publications applied when they decided to expose a secret counter-terrorism operation? Before which body do they justify their actions? And, most important, what consequences will they pay if their "hard" decisions prove to be a serious mistake?

The answer is none, to all three. For much of the legacy media, the war on terror is no longer a global confrontation. It's a domestic political battle, and regrettably, much of the media has taken sides. What else can explain the zealous reporting of every alleged mistake of American service personnel but the dearth of stories of their heroism and dedication to their mission? How can it be that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi can be portrayed as the most dangerous terrorist eluding coalition forces when he's alive, but an easily replaceable, inconsequential dolt once he's dead?

Regrettably, the exposure of the secret and legal terrorist financial surveillance program, led by The New York Times, was not an isolated act. It was an escalation.