We saw this play out last week when The Times, in an important story from Yemen, broke its long silence on the location of a base used for American drone strikes in the region. Like other major news organizations, including The Washington Post and The Associated Press, The Times agreed well over a year ago to keep that location — Saudi Arabia — quiet. Instead, it wrote at various times of a base on the Arabian Peninsula. (Other news outlets eventually did name the country, making the secrecy almost a moot point.)

Top editors at The Times changed their minds last week for several reasons. One was that, after monitoring the matter for months, “we were not aware of any specific security threats,” said David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief. In addition, the base location was at the heart of this article, according to Dean Baquet, the managing editor, while previously it had been “a footnote.” The most pressing reason, though, was that the drone program’s architect, John O. Brennan, had been nominated to lead the Central Intelligence Agency and The Times had a responsibility to examine his record.

In short, it was time for the facts to come out.

High time, I’d say.

That’s because the bigger and more troubling issue is whether the information should have been withheld to begin with. The reason offered — that naming the location would upset Saudi citizens to the point that the base might have to be closed, thus hampering America’s counterterrorism efforts — doesn’t cut it. Keeping the government’s secrets is not the news media’s role, unless there is a clear, direct and life-threatening reason to justify it. The classic example is revealing troop movements in wartime. Such a specific threat doesn’t exist now, and from all I can glean, it didn’t exist many months ago either.

Image

This discussion couldn’t be more important, considering the context: the darkness in which America’s drone program has been operating and quickly growing.