The money quote in Denis Collins’s embarrassing Washington Post revelation of his musings about jury duty at the Libby trial: “I knew that if I looked beyond Libby’s actions, I could link this case to troops dying in Iraq and to Plame’s career.”

But how might he have done so, had he wished?

If Plame was not a covert agent, and not “outed” by Libby, how was Libby responsible for the status of her career? And how are troop deaths in Iraq linked to Libby-other than something silly like “Libby lied, thousands died”?

Is Collins’s “troops dying in Iraq” referring to exaggerated WMD claims? But Congress, including a majority of House and Senate Democrats, voted for 23 reasons to go to war, in addition to giving speeches about the dangers of Saddam’s WMD program.

Collins only reveals why it was a bad idea to have an ex-Washington Post reporter on a jury deliberating a case in which the D.C. media was intimately involved.