Treason
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Treason is, in John Kiriakou's account, one of the most carelessly used words in American political speech, and one of the few whose meaning is fixed in the Constitution rather than left to usage.

The definition, and the stake

Treason is delineated in the Constitution and is very specific. It is also, he stresses first, a death-penalty case, so an accusation of treason is a demand that the accused be executed for what they have done. The definition itself is taking up arms against your country, or providing aid and comfort to the enemy during a time of war.

He supports the death-penalty point with a historical claim he gives only once: "everyone in American history who has been charged with treason has been sentenced to death. About half of those executions have been carried out." That is what turns the rhetorical question into a literal one, and he completes it without softening: when John Brennan called Donald Trump treasonous, "what John is saying is that the President of the United States ought to be executed."

On that definition, he says, people throw the word around constantly without knowing what it means, and make themselves look foolish in the process, a group in which he includes journalists and John Brennan, "who seems to know everything about everything." None of them, in his reading, have read the Constitution.

Why disagreement cannot be treason

The occasion was the accusation, made by well-known establishment journalists after the 2018 Helsinki summit, that Donald Trump had committed treason by publicly disagreeing with the intelligence community's assessment that Russia had interfered in the election.

Kiriakou's objection is prior to the politics. The intelligence community does not represent the United States; it consists of unelected officers. The CIA's entire raison d'être is to provide support to policymakers so that the policymakers can formulate policy, it is not for the CIA, or for Brennan, to decide what foreign policy is supposed to be. That belongs to the White House and the State Department.

From this he draws a symmetry that he regards as fatal to the charge. Whether or not one likes it, the president was elected and gets to set his own foreign policy; the remedy is an election, not an accusation of a capital crime. And if a citizen may say I agree with the intelligence community and disagree with the president without being a traitor, then the president who disagrees with the intelligence community cannot be one either. He calls the position, on its face, one that makes absolutely no sense.

The press

He extends the criticism to the newspaper that carried much of the accusation. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, and its editorial page is run by an editor whose first name Kiriakou cannot retrieve on air, saying only "what's his first name, it escapes me right now." The two of them, he says, have determined that the Post will be the anti-Trump newspaper, which is their right as owners of the newspaper, but which obliges them to be able to back up what they print. Calling a president's foreign policy treasonous because you disagree with it, in his view, fails that test and merely makes the paper look silly.

What troubles him more is the audience: he says he cannot believe people would be hoodwinked by the propaganda, and puts the reaction down to "the lizard brain" being excited in the establishment press.

See also

- John Brennan
- Donald Trump
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Russiagate
- Misleading Headlines
