The New York Times’ empty suit ombudsman Clark Hoyt grapples with the issue of whether the Times acted ethically, by deliberately “outing” the CIA operative who interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Of course, Hoyt decides the Times is blameless.

The Public Editor - Weighing the Risk - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

Notice that in the worldview of the New York Times, there are essentially no circumstances at all in which they would have withheld this information.

To call what they’re doing “weighing the risk” is ludicrous. A better phrase would be “weighing the potential profit.”

TWO weeks ago, over the objections of his lawyer and the Central Intelligence Agency, The Times named the interrogator who used shrewd psychology, not rough stuff, to get Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to talk.

The interrogator and his family fear that the newspaper has endangered their lives, and many readers asked why The Times could not have withheld his name. Suzanne Dupre of Evanston, Ill., said she was shocked by The Times’s decision. Deuce Martinez “was loyally serving his country in a dangerous job,” she wrote. “The Times has made him a marked man.”

Scott Shane, the reporter, and his editors said that using the name was necessary for credibility. [Because the New York Times NEVER uses anonymous sources, right? – ed.] Martinez was, after all, the central character in the story. They said that nobody provided evidence that Martinez would be in any greater danger than the scores of others who have been identified in the news media for their roles in the war against Al Qaeda.