Why Rove's Treason Matters

When Karl Rove outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, he also ruined a CIA front company known as Brewster-Jennings. This front company was investigating the illegal transfer of nuclear weapons grade materials from country to country. Its work was important in the extreme.

I'd like to emphasize this section of the article to which I've linked:

What was really lost with the unmasking of Brewster Jennings & Associates?

From Knight-Ridder (October 13, 2005): Training agents such as Plame, 40, costs millions of dollars and requires the time-consuming establishment of elaborate fictions, called “legends,” including in this case the creation of a CIA front company that helped lend plausibility to her trips overseas.

Compounding the damage, the front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, whose name has been reported previously, apparently also was used by other CIA officers whose work now could be at risk, according to Vince Cannistraro, formerly the agency’s chief of counterterrorism operations and analysis.

Now, Plame’s career as a covert operations officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) is over. Those she dealt with – whether on business or not – may be in danger. The DO is conducting an extensive damage assessment.

And Plame’s exposure may make it harder for American spies to convince foreigners to share important secrets with them, U.S. intelligence officials said.

Bush partisans tend to downplay the leak’s damage, saying Plame’s true job was widely known in Washington, if unspoken. And, they say, she had moved from the DO, the CIA’s covert arm, to an analysis job.

But intelligence professionals, infuriated over the breach and what they see as the Bush administration’s misuse of intelligence on Iraq, vehemently disagree.

Larry Johnson – a former CIA and State Department official who was a 1985 classmate of Plame’s in the CIA’s case officer-training program at Camp Peary, Va., known as “the Farm” – predicted that when the CIA’s internal damage assessment is finished, “at the end of the day, (the harm) will be huge and some people potentially may have lost their lives.” [Emphasis added]

“This is not just another leak. This is an unprecedented exposing of an agent’s identity,” said former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski, who’s now a prosecutor in Royal Oak, Mich., and who also did CIA training with Plame…

This is what Rove and his accomplices did, all out vicious spite, in an effort to smear a critic. This is why what they did was an act of treason. It is why, if found guilty in a court of law,they should be sent to prison for a long time.

George W. Bush's principal advisor is a traitor, pure and simple. He puts the Republican Party above America--as do so many others in the Right's leadership.