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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (2645)	2/6/2004 6:36:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7936

Frankly, what Townhall or the NRO says is unimportant to me. I no longer believe them and their journalistic integrity is borderline at best in my mind. I of course disagree about their integrity, and if integrity is an issue its Larry Elder's integrity not the web site where his article is posted. In any case even if his integrity was questionable it doesn't refute the argument. It reasonable to not accept someone as a source of facts if you don't think they are honest but an argument cares not for the honesty of the person arguing it. Logically it stands and falls on its own. For that matter most of the argument isn't in Elder's own words. It's quotes from James Woolsey, Bill Clinton, David Kay, and various foreign leaders. Are you saying that they all lack integrity so much that you shouldn't even listen to their statements even if only to refute them? The main argument that is entirely in Elder's own words is that our intelligence has failed use time and time again about WMD, both giving false positives and false negatives. He mentions - "After the first Gulf War in 1991, the advanced nature of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program shocked intelligence analysts. Nuclear bomb testing in India and Pakistan came as a surprise, as did the advanced nature of Iran's and Libya's WMD programs." - But their where other cases as well. North Korea was further along then we originally thought. In the cold war their was the famous, and it turns out false "missile gap". These failures are largely due to the fact that intelligence can't always be right, it involves guesswork and uncertainties but even considering that I think we need to improve out human intelligence our signal intercept and photo intel is excellent but there are many gaps in human intelligence. Also see Message 19774895 Tim