Bigger Than Watergate - Bush-Cheney Traitors Deserve Prison, Impeachment

To weigh the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame against historical standards, consider that no leader of the Soviet Union--including that master of ruthlessness, Josef Stalin--ever arranged for the name of a KGB operative to appear in a newspaper. Adolf Hitler had countless millions murdered, yet getting at a political enemy by endangering agents of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi intelligence service, didn't cross his mind. In this respect, not even the worst tyrants have stooped to the level of George W. Bush.

Don't let the Republicans distract you. Treasongate isn't just about deposed vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, who has been charged with five felony counts and faces 30 years in prison, or even deputy presidential chief of staff Karl Rove, who may soon be charged as well. The Libby charges clearly point to the real culprit: Dick Cheney, who told Libby about Plame's covert status in the first place. Cheney abused his security clearance to find out. "Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the C.I.A.," reads page five of the indictment.

"Cheney doesn't have a legal problem, but he has a political problem," a White House official told the New York Times. For now.

The stink on Karl Rove rubbed off on his boss. When Treasongate first broke in 2003, Bush promised to get to the bottom of the Plame leak and fire everyone involved. Now we know that he is the bottom of the cover-up. "An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair," reported the New York Daily News, which owns the story of this scandal, in an account the White House tacitly confirmed with a meaningful inside-the-Beltway no-comment: silence = truth. "A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President," says the News.

An earlier News report revealed a secret White House Iraq Group (WHIG) that "morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims [that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons]" from late 2002 to mid-2003. WHIG's members included Rove, Libby, and disgraced Times reporter/Bush stenographer Judith Miller.