Actually, DougR, my data about the history between the intell community and the Hill does not come from the Internet. It comes from Bob Woodward's history of the CIA during the Sandanista-contra troubles, and personal interviews with people who were involved.

These data have little to do with Iraqs current status of threat. Nicole has offered a line of reasoning which stirkes me as quite rationale in her assessments; but her assessments, like yours, are based on viewpoint, since you are both trying to extrapolate from a dearth of hard facts. You extrapolate by crediting authorities with better data than you have, or so it seems to me; she extrapolates by estimating how things work. Either way, we are outside the palisade of certainty.

Now our respected Commander-In-Chief is standing somewhere along the same gradation between ignorance, half-ignorance, and actual knowledge, which has a lot of way-stops along it. He is speaking as though he has enough facts to arrive at a high degree of certainty. But he has not seen fit to provide facts, other than the same ones that have been out there since before the election with very few exceptions.

If that is all the data he really has than he is arriving at a very bellicose conclusion based on little data which is why some people feel he is a war-monger. And he is rejecting what may well be much more viable alternatives, exrtrapolating from the known facts, which is why some people accuse him of being stupid.

If he has a much higher grade or amount of information, then I would ask--for the ninth time -- why he feels so strongly that he cannot articulate the data he has, at least indirectly. I understand the sanctity of sources. But somehow I do not believe that is the explanation behind his failure to make a factual caser for armed intervention.

It isn't so much that his path will lead to the use of weapons and the waste of millions of dollars better spent improving water. It is that people will be wounded, torn apart, killed, and deprived of their husbands, children, wives, parents, and grandparents (collateral damage of this sort may be unacceptable, but that doesn't make it avoidable!).

T-bag: The reason I keep on here talking, even though I "won't be going" is because unlike some of your peers, I give a shit about other humans than myself, or those just like me. There are a lot of brownskinned lads and lasses on both sides of the ocean who are going to be eating lead and discovering that death is not a cartoon figure, you dig? And for no good reason that I have yet seen. What do you care, anyway? You're not speaking up about it one way or the other.

A