Why does the press publish classified information? After all, laying government secrets out on the front page could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” Right?

Not quite.

Washington Post associate editor Robert G. Kaiser, writing in Sunday’s edition, explains why the paper publishes government secrets and what steps it takes to ensure that anything that would cause damage to the national security, such as Osama bin Laden’s hideout, remain secret. (I’m not telling you either.)

Self-government and self-defense are two values that don’t always coexist easily — they have to be balanced. But balance is the Founders’ greatest gift. They gave us three branches of government to prevent any one from getting an upper hand. And they gave us a free press, a completely independent observer to keep the people informed about the doings of the other three.

Once we understand the need for balance, it follows logically that no single authority should be able to decide what information should reach the public. Some readers ask us why the president’s decisions on how best to protect the nation shouldn’t govern us, and specifically our choices of what to publish. The answer is that in the American system of checks and balances, the president cannot be allowed to decide what the voters need to know to hold him accountable. A king may have such power, but the elected executive of a republic cannot, or we will have no more republic.

Labeling something “classified” or important to “national security” does not make it so. The government overclassifies with abandon. And the definition of “national security” is elusive. Some politicians act as though revealing any classified information threatens our nation’s security, but that seems preposterous. . . .

For the Founders, the issue was freedom and how best to secure it. Addressing that point in his Pentagon Papers opinion, Justice Hugo Black captured the spirit that animates my profession in just two sentences:

“The government’s power to censor the press was abolished [by the First Amendment] so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.” — Washington Post

The whole thing is well worth reading.

If the government tells you that the press has damaged the national security by publishing some bit of classified information, you should be very skeptical of that claim, especially if it comes from George W. Bush, whose administration is well known for overclassification and excessive secrecy. In Bush’s case, the only national security he’s talking about is whether he’s publicly embarrassed, or perhaps caught in a criminal act.

(Thanks again.)