A U.S. Army private is suspected of leaking thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents to an internet site, and now news media all over the world are publishing stories based on what they’ve found written in those documents.

Two things are happening. First, the government and the military are being embarrassed by the news reports of some of the details in the documents, which is not a big deal.

The other thing that’s happening is that the leaks are empowering the enemies of America, within and without, to more effectively hurt and kill U.S. soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen. That is a big deal. It’s despicable, it’s treasonous, it’s unforgivable.

Military authorities are investigating whether Army intelligence clerk PFC Bradley Manning downloaded secret material into his personal computer and transmitted the secret documents to unauthorized people, with reason to believe that such information could be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of any foreign nation.

Authori- ties suspect he was the source of WikiLeaks.org’s release of some 76,000 military and diplomatic documents.

As a U.S. Navy journalist, I worked with the Navy’s public relations officers to keep a cork in the leakage of classified information to the media. We always understood and respected reporters’ professional need to ask hard questions and to get the story, but we were tasked with getting the facts out to the media in a way that didn’t compromise secret material and (preferably) didn’t make the Navy look bad.

Did we lie? Never intentionally. Did we feed the media just what we wanted to feed them and no more? You bet. If they wanted a story, they needed to work for it.

Now, with WikiLeaks.org becoming the new leaking medium, reporters are able to tap into a vast amount of data, digging through thousands of messages, e-mails, and other documents to find something juicy from which they can make a story.

In this database journalism, today’s media certainly have found what they wanted, and the revelations are only starting to come out. The press will be feasting on the secrets in the leaked material for months to come, and we can expect the Obama administration and the Pentagon to have a lot of spindoctoring public relations puffery to deflect whatever criticism comes their way. The republic, however, will survive. At worst, the leaks may damage the war effort and hurt the U.S. strategically, which was the intent of the leakers, whoever they are. But what the media does with the leaked documents isn’t the worst problem. The military details in the documents can provide Taliban fighters on the ground with bits and pieces of vital tactical information that they can piece together and use to kill more American servicemen.

If he did what he’s suspected of, I’m sure the soldier who leaked the document has his reasons for stabbing his fellow soldiers in the back. The leak of classified information was apparently a purposeful act of treachery by a trusted soldier who, because he disapproved of the way the war was being fought, turned and went to war against his own country.

No spin-doctoring can undo the damage that one traitor has tried to do to his fellow soldiers, his brothers in arms. Long after the embarrassing stories come and go, the pain a traitor causes will go on.