September 17, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House -
"Consortium
News" -
General
Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, has been
in the news
this week. The Washington Post reported that
in the final months of the Trump Administration,
Milley on two occasions phoned his Chinese
counterpart to assure him that the U.S. military
leadership would not allow President Donald Trump to
launch a war with China.
The U.S. Intelligence
Community had concluded that the Chinese feared that
Trump would ignite a war in the South China Sea, and
the Chinese began making defensive moves. Milley
called Chinese General Li Zuecheng to assure him
that “democracy was sloppy sometimes,” but that
there would be no war with China. Milley also
expressed his grave concerns about Trump’s mental
state with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with the
other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Within hours of the
Post’s report,
Trump accused Milley
of “treason.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that
Milley’s behavior was “treasonous.”
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) called Milley “treasonist”
(sic). And a lineup of Fox News hosts echoed the
sentiment. The casualness with which people are
throwing around an accusation that, if prosecuted,
can carry the
death penalty,
reminds me of Donald Trump three years ago.
Trump in 2018 accused
an FBI agent who, during the 2016 campaign, had sent
anti-Trump texts to his girlfriend, also an FBI
agent, of “treason.” He told he
The Wall Street Journal,
“A man is tweeting [sic] to his lover that if
Hillary loses, we’ll essentially do the insurance
policy. This is the FBI we’re talking about – that
is treason.”
Treason is arguably the
gravest crime with which an American can be charged.
And it’s being bandied about as punishment for a
general making a phone call to his Chinese
counterpart and for an FBI agent sending a text that
the president didn’t like.
What the
Constitution Says
Treason is one of only
two crimes that are actually defined in the
Constitution.
Article III, Section 3 states clearly:
“Treason against the
United States shall consist only in levying war
against them, or in adhering to their enemies,
giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be
convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two
witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in
open court.”
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Treason can only
technically be committed during wartime as only a
Congressional declaration of war creates an “enemy.”
Milley obviously didn’t
commit treason. But this isn’t just Republicans
being their normal bombastic selves. “Treason” is a
term that is used far too loosely these days. And
it’s dangerous.
A couple of years ago I
appeared in an obscure Spike TV documentary about
whistleblowers. The reporters interviewed friends,
supporters, and journalists. They each offered their
views on the motivation of whistleblowers, what I
had revealed about the CIA’s torture program, and
the Obama administration’s use of the Espionage Act
to curb national security whistleblowing.
The responses were what
you might expect – whistleblowing is good, the
public has a need to know, etc. But one of the
people interviewed, Ronald Kessler, a has-been
reporter for the hard right-wing newspaper The
Washington Times, said pointedly that the
discussion shouldn’t be about the concept of
whistleblowing. It should be about my “treason”
against the United States. The interviewer pressed
him and he repeated, “Kiriakou is a traitor.”
I allowed myself a few
days to cool off and, in the end, I just let it go.
Nobody saw that documentary anyway, and Kessler was
so unhinged that the handful of people who did see
it didn’t take him seriously.
Few Cases in
History
But that word “treason”
has entered the American political vernacular. We
see it all the time now, as if it’s somehow normal
that traitors are allowed to commit their treason
and continue to walk the streets and work in
high-ranking positions in the government. In just
the past two years there have been myriad examples.
Former Maricopa County,
Arizona sheriff
Joe Arpaio,
himself a convicted criminal, said after a speech on
the floor of the Senate by then-Arizona Republican
senator Jeff Flake that Flake’s criticism of Trump
was “a treason-type situation.”
Former White House
counselor Steve Bannon told author Michael Wolff for
his book Fire and Fury that Donald Trump
Jr.’s meeting with a Russian attorney during the
campaign was “treasonous.” Should Trump Jr. get the
death penalty for taking the meeting? You don’t have
to like the Trumps to think not.
When whistleblower
Chelsea Manning announced her short-lived candidacy
for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland in 2018, the
conservative Washington Examiner called her an “entitled
traitor” and
breathlessly said,
“Chelsea Manning, former soldier,
nearly
convicted of
treason, announced over the weekend he [sic] is
running for U.S. Senate from the state of Maryland.”
Wow. Never mind that Manning was never charged with
treason.
So who has committed
treason in U.S. history? Not many people. There have
been
only 15
across the centuries. The first were Philip Vigol
and John Mitchell, both sentenced to hang for their
roles in the Whiskey Rebellion. They were pardoned
by George Washington. Another was the great
abolitionist John Brown, who was executed in 1859
for his attempt to organize armed resistance to
slavery.
The most recent were
five individuals who took up arms against the U.S.
or who worked as propagandists against the U.S.
during World War II. They included Axis Sally and
Tokyo Rose.
This perplexing use of
the word “treason” is a testament to the vitriol
with which Americans now conduct political
discussions. But talk of treason has to stop right
now. The only logical next step is that somebody in
a position of authority, a particularly
authoritarian president (like Trump) or an attorney
general, for example, takes it to a prosecution. And
at that point the Constitution is dead.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism
officer and a former senior investigator with the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama
administration under the Espionage Act—a law
designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in
prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the
Bush administration’s torture program.
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