I have just received word that the New York Times is preparing to go public with a list of names of Americans covertly working in Afghanistan providing force protection for our troops, as well as the rest of our Coalition Forces. If the Times actually sees this through, the red ink they are drowning in will be nothing compared to the blood their entire organization will be covered with. Make no mistake, the Times is about to cause casualty rates in Afghanistan to skyrocket. Each and every American should be outraged.

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As chronicled here, here, here, and here the Central Intelligence Agency via the New York Times has been waging a nasty proxy war against the Department of Defense over its use of former military and intelligence personnel to do what the CIA is both incapable and unwilling to do: gather the much needed intelligence that keeps our troops safe.

According to Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius, “[T]he U.S. military has long been unhappy about the quality of CIA intelligence in Afghanistan,” and the senior military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj Gen Michael T. Flynn went so far as to publish a stunning report calling for “sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself.”

The report goes on to quote General Stanley McChrystal, who stated that “our senior leaders – the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the President of the United States – are not getting the right information to make decisions with … The media is driving the issues.”

Through its use of the New York Times, the Central Intelligence Agency has tried to embarrass the Defense Department into shutting down what, by all accounts, has been an amazingly successful program, which has dramatically saved American and Coalition lives and continues to do so on a daily basis.

But thanks to the beating the folks on the 7th floor at Langley and the New York Times have taken in the blogosphere, they are about to go for broke and to do so in a fashion so grotesque that every American should be moved to action.

These morbidly conjoined twins have entered dangerous territory. They are not only putting at risk the lives of the brave men and women working day and night to keep our troops safe (who, along with their families, will surely be targeted for retribution by al Qaeda and the Taliban), but they are also calling down a host of legal woes via the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (made famous in the Valerie Plame affair under the George W. Bush Administration) as the intelligence gathered and reported on by the Defense Department operatives in question is most definitely classified.

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So while the New York Times stands ready to once again put American lives at grave risk in order to sell a few more papers, the Central Intelligence Agency appears committed to its misguided “Kappes Doctrine”, (so named for Leon Panetta’s number-two man, who many in the intel game blame for being the “hidden hand in many of the nation’s intelligence failures”). Per the Kappes Doctrine, which was so disastrously tied to the F.O.B. Chapman attack, the Agency is happy to pay foreign intel services to take the risks as long as the CIA can take the credit (and in this case, continue to claim that what the Department of Defense is doing every day on the ground in Afghanistan can’t be done).

But fortunately for our troops, it is being done, it has saved countless lives, and it will continue to do so, unless the Times publishes its list.

To prevent its publication, I am calling on all Americans: Democrats, Republicans and Independents to bombard the New York Times and insist that they refrain from outing these brave Americans who are risking everything for the safety of our troops.

What the Central Intelligence Agency and the New York Times has cooked up is a recipe for unmitigated disaster and we used to have a word for it in our lexicon. We called it treason. But unlike the treason committed by the Times in the past, we have been granted a heads up and this time each one of us can do something about it.