About 150 New Yorkers gathered earlier this week to demonstrate their outrage over the New York Times’s decision to publish details of a classified Treasury Department program designed to track down the financial resources of Al Qaeda. The rally, led by the president of the Caucus for America, Rabbi Arye Spero, differed from the raucous, hate-filled anti-war protests because “leftists have time to demonstrate all day, because they don’t have jobs,” one of the protesters said. “We can only come after work.”

Such events that focus on the irresponsibility of biased news organizations are extremely important. However, prosecuting the Times for its perfidy would be unwise and dangerous to our constitutional liberties.

Speakers at the rally included the chairman of the Congress of Equality, Roy Innis, Jewish activist Beth Gilinsky, and radio talk show host Barry Farber. A woman participating in a counterdemonstration kept blowing a whistle to interrupt the proceedings. Making noise instead of sense has long been the practice of those on the wrong side of the argument.

In order to halt the attempts to dismantle our shield against further enemy attacks, we need to focus on the real villains. The Times editors and reporters may have allowed their loathing of President Bush to cloud their judgment, but they received the classified information from a traitor within the administration. That’s the person who should be in the crosshairs of a congressional investigation.

Since the eruption of this treachery, the Times’s editor, Bill Keller, in an effort to minimize the damage, has issued several statements that defy credibility. One argument: The public has a right to know what our government is doing when it infringes on our privacy rights. Another: The enemy already knew that we were tracking their financial dealings. Another: This news was already public. If that were truly the case, then why would the Times put it on the front page?

What has steamed so many of us is that we are in the middle of a global war. Apologists for the Times’s actions say the fourth estate has disclosed classified information in other perilous times and that this is nothing new. During World War II, the Chicago Tribune, in a story about the Battle of Midway, disclosed the news that America had broken Japan’s codes.

Although President Reagan accepted the blame for the Marine deaths in Lebanon, the guilt may have truly belonged to the press. The esteemed publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham, admitted in a 1986 article that a television network and a newspaper reporter in 1983 disclosed that the U.S. government had intercepted radio traffic between Syria and Iran, which masterminded a fatal bomb attack on the American embassy in Beirut. “Shortly thereafter the traffic ceased,” she wrote. “This undermined efforts to capture the terrorist leaders and eliminated a source of information about future attacks. Five months later, apparently the same terrorists struck again at the Marine barracks in Beirut; 241 servicemen were killed.”

Mr. Keller needs to read and reread Graham’s article in the Washington Post, “Safeguarding Our Freedoms As We Cover Terrorist Acts.” I especially love her statement: “There is a real danger, in short, that terrorists hijack not only airplanes and hostages, but the media as well.”

That our press has been hijacked is indisputable, and some of the signs at the rally reflected that opinion: “Read the Times — Qaeda Does!”; “Buy the Times — Support Our Enemies”; “The NY Times: All the News That Fits the Enemy’s Agenda. Disarming America One Column at a Time.”

What has eluded Mr. Keller and others at the Times is that while other press peccadilloes have endangered our efforts during wartime, they imperiled only our overseas engagements and personnel. Has “the old gray lady” forgotten what happened on September 11, 2001? The danger is right here, right now for all of us.

Despite all this, like Graham, I believe that government muzzling of the fourth estate is dangerous. It is far better to let market forces and ordinary citizens remove their support from those sponsoring the blabbing press until it learns to do its job with unbiased integrity. Keep those rallies going, but let’s not forget that a free press is a hallmark of our democratic society.

In Stephen King’s novel “Firestarter,” the heroine’s only recourse to expose the truth of the enemies pursuing her is to go to the reporters at Rolling Stone magazine. In the 1984 film version, the Times becomes her sanctuary.

How sad it is to watch the old gray lady fall off her venerable pedestal.