The Traitor

Whether or not Karl Rove is guilty of the specific crime of revealing a cover CIA operative's identity (and we are hearing that the criteria for prosecuting this crime are difficult to meet), the large issue of whether he is a traitor has been settled.
The answer is yes.
What Karl Rove did in spreading the Valerie Wilson story was to make petty vengeance against an administration critic a higher priority than the war on terror. He sold out the country to bolster the political fortunes of his boss, George W. Bush.
Mrs. Wilson is a specialist on Weapons of Mass Destruction. By publicizing her identity, Mr. Rove at the very least inhibited her ability to conduct the research that presumably is central to her mission. Even if Mrs. Wilson was by the time of the leak occupying a desk at Langley rather than working covertly abroad, discretion is critical to the ability to gather intelligence. Besides the fact -- and one that is mentioned very little if at all --he may have endangered the lives of Mrs. Wilson's sources, who presumably live in the countries about which she was gathering information. And that puts all of us in greater peril, which is the simple reason why Mr. Rove should be prosecuted for treason.
But of course Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush don't really care about research, do they? They want to draw conclusions first and then distort or manufacture evidence to support their conclusions. That's what the Downing Street Memos show.
Shakespeare's Sister lays it all out much more effectively than I can.