Where There's Smoke....

Conservatives resist adding two and two together. According to the hyperconservative Washington Times:

During the ensuing debate in the Senate, Mr. Reid said Mr. Libby's indictment showed "this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq."

Ironically, while Democrats were trying to tie the Libby indictment and the Iraq war together, the chief investigator into the CIA leak said there was no connection between the two events.

"This indictment is not about the war," special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said at last week's press conference announcing the charges against Mr. Libby.

"This indictment's not about the propriety of the war, and people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are -- have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel," he said.

Mr. Fitzgerald was simply saying a criminal prosecution isn't a political process. But the two events - the Libby indictment and the Iraq War - are very much connected. Would the Administration have been so determined to break the law (remember, Valerie Plame worked in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, not the Directorate of Intelligence, so they knew immediately she wasn't just an analyst) if Joseph C. Wilson IV, her husband, wasn't directly attacking THE chief justification for their cozy little war?