President Obama has nominated Solomon B. Watson IV to be general counsel of the Army. Mr. Watson would be coming to this slot after spending 32 years at the New York Times, including a stint as its senior vice president and chief legal officer.

Near the end of Mr. Watson’s tenure, the paper published a series of stories compromising two highly classified counterterrorism programs. One, in December 2005, offered crucial details of the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, designed to track al Qaeda communications into and out of the United States. Another, in June 2006, disclosed a secret program designed to track the movement of terrorist funds through the Belgian financial clearinghouse known as SWIFT. Top officials in the government, and leading Republicans and Democrats in Congress, bemoaned the serious damage to national security that the paper had inflicted. (A comprehensive discussion of the episode can be found in my forthcoming book Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law.)