Some Unusual Crap
The guys over at the Power Line direct my attention to this article by Murray Waas in the National Journal on the undying subject of the Plame Unpleasantness (emphasis mine):

The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.

And why shouldn't they, Murray? It was George Tenet and his miserable bunch of lawyers who referred this nonsense to the Department of Justice after his agency basically allowed Wilson to run his fucking mouth to anyone who would listen to him talk about Niger.

At this point, it would take a lot to convince me that Tenet wasn't ratfucking the White House on the WMD issue.

Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of [Douglas] Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:

"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

Of course, what fascinates me most about all of this is that it's the anti-war/anti-intelligence Leftists who are sticking up for the CIA. Have you noticed that? They will sometimes lapse into their usual mode and even criticize the Company for its incompetence, but most of the time these days, the anti-Bush Left are perfectly happy to find heroes like Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson coming in from the cold to help them undermine this Administration.

Expediency is the the new ethic, see.

As for whether Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda, I have only one name for you: Zarqawi. There's your answer, friends. If you can explain Zarqawi's activities in Iraq in the aftermath of the War for Afghanistan without involving the Saddamites' collusions, then it may be you who is manipulating the evidence.