Should the New York Times get the death penalty or merely a jail sentence? If the Times is guilty of treason in wartime, then obviously the “Gray Lady” should be wearing prison stripes – at best.

But although the Times is open about its willingness – make that eagerness – to publish secrets in wartime, it doesn’t appear that the Justice Department plans to do anything in response. And so it’s fair to ask: Does the Bush administration have a serious plan for winning the international war on terror, or is it drifting down the path of least political resistance – and thus, to defeat?

Friday, the Times printed details about federal surveillance of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), based in Belgium. The U.S. government’s goal has been to uncover terror-financing networks, which are no small phenomena: Two years ago, the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report showing that Saudi Arabia, alone, gives $12 billion a year to Islamic “charities.” Vice President Dick Cheney said the financial surveillance was “absolutely essential.” And apparently, the SWIFT-tapping program has scored some significant successes. The feds captured the mastermind of the 2002 bombing in Bali, which killed more than 200 people, as well as a Brooklyn man who laundered huge cash transfers to al-Qaida agents in Pakistan.

The results in the five years since Sept. 11 speak for themselves: Something has been going right on the homeland security front. The recent arrests of seven men in Miami, accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, are a reminder that homeland security authorities are vigilant.

Much of the political reaction to the Times’ story has been fierce: Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House homeland security committee, called on the attorney general to “begin an investigation and prosecution of the New York Times – the reporters, the editors and the publisher.” King added, “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous.” Similar criticism chorused across cable news, talk radio and the blogosphere.

Yet all of this might sound a bit familiar, because the Times’ latest revelations come on the heels of similar Times revelations last December, concerning the government’s effort to wiretap terrorists’ phone calls. Those earlier disclosures led Gabriel Schoenfeld, writing in the March issue of Commentary magazine, to assert that it was “perfectly clear” that the Times could and should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917.

After 6,700 words of close legal analysis, Schoenfeld asked whether “we as a nation can afford to permit the reporters and editors of a great newspaper to become the unelected authority that determines for all of us what is a legitimate secret and what is not.”

So why hasn’t the Bush administration done anything? One answer, of course, is that the wheels of justice grind slowly – and unseen, at least for a while. But a better answer comes from Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who argues that the Bush administration has been “intimidated” by the media and by allied critics in Congress. That would explain the Boston Globe story Monday, detailing how the Bushies, who once asserted that the phone taps were perfectly legal just the way they were, are now willing to accept closer congressional supervision. So score a media-political victory for the Times.

And so the “Gray Lady” has every reason to think it will win this latest battle, too. The fate of the war on terror, of course, is another story – but the Times is too busy crushing George W. Bush to worry much about that.