Why Karl Rove should be tried for Treason

The conservatives who criticize the publication of the WikiLeaks material were not heard complaining when President George W. Bush and his national security team provided Bob Woodward and his coauthor, Dan Balz, with notes and minutes of still-secret National Security Council proceedings regarding the most sensitive matters of U.S. war planning and intelligence collection.

Similarly, it was liberals, not conservatives, who took the Bush administration officials to task for leaking the identity of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame in order to discredit the information provided by her husband, Joseph Wilson.

What is different about the WikiLeaks data is the scale of the leak, the motive of the leaker, and the manner in which it was ultimately made available.

The same Obama administration that condemns the leaks has said: “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.” However, if the government decides what constitutes transparency, how can it achieve either objective?

War is the most serious thing to which a government can commit a society. A government that can make war while keeping essential information about its justification and conduct secret is neither open nor fit for free people.

President Obama, like his predecessors, asks for our trust. He'd say he can’t tell us everything, but government in a democratic society requires confidence in its leaders. A similar appeal for trust failed to impress Thomas Jefferson in 1798.

In his protest of the Adams administration’s Alien and Sedition Acts (which essentially criminalized harsh criticism of the government), Jefferson wrote in the Kentucky Resolutions, “[I]t would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism – free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”

Or as the Irish statesman John Philpot Curran said eight years earlier, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”

Yet how can Americans exercise vigilance against government threats to their liberty if critical information is systematically withheld? They can’t. That’s why people such as Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers 39 years ago, and perhaps Manning heroically risked personal ruin and defied authority to bring that information to us.

The statement by republican Presidential hopeful Huckabee that Assange should be tried for treason and killed show the damaging effect of Americans corrupted by perpetual war and the national security state apparatus. It would be refreshing if national news outlets would ask why Karl Rove or Gordon Libby were never tried for treason when they outed CIA officer Valarie Plame. As opposed to Assange, who is not a US citizen and cannot be charges with treason, the legal case for Rove and Libby to be charged for treason appears to be greater.

However, Rove, a man who never finished college, is still living a comfortable life, while thousands of men and woman who went to Iraq because of his advice to the president to go ahead with the attack on Iraq in 2003, came back home to the US in coffins.