In his press conference, Special Prosectutor Patrick Fitzgerald said, “This indictment is not about the war.”
UPDATE: Now that Bruce has posted the entire transcript of Fitzgerald’s press conference, I can include the entirety of the special prosecutor’s answer to the question as to whether the indictment represents “a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.”
Fitzgerald’s response:
This indictment is not about the war. 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 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.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer’s identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person — a person, Mr. Libby — lied or not.
The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.
And I think anyone’s who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.