TREASONGATE: IT'S NOT JUST KARL ROVE

TREASONGATE: IT'S NOT JUST KARL ROVE
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By Ted Rall
13 minutes ago
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NEW YORK--Since Karl Rove surfaced last week as the White House official who probably unmasked a covert CIA agent, new developments appear to confirm that the deputy chief of staff and chief Bush political strategist has committed treason:

In 1985 CIA traitor Aldrich Ames sold the KGB the names of every U.S. spy in the Soviet Union in return for $2 million. Arrests and executions soon wiped out America's human assets in the Soviet Union. As they were caught unprepared by one shocker after another--glasnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the USSR--intelligence professionals suspected a well-placed mole as the culprit. But Ames wasn't caught for another nine years.

Karl Rove, on the other hand, has already been found out as a likely traitor to the United States. Now we must work backwards. Does his exposure help to explain some of the Administration's most baffling foreign policy blunders?

No matter how remote, we must now consider the possibility that Karl Rove may in the employ of, and/or receiving money from, a terrorist organization such as Al Qaeda. Alternatively, could he be in the employ of a hostile foreign government? If he betrayed a CIA agent, Rove is a traitor and therefore capable of anything. Only an exhaustive investigation of his and his associates' anti-American activities, up to and including those committed by George W. Bush, can resolve these questions.

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National security is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans may be divided over various ideological conflicts, but all patriotic Americans should be able to agree on a zero-tolerance policy for treason. Rove, those who worked with him and anyone who protected him must go.