re: Cherry picking
The point I was making is that many of the "facts" on which the anti-war people hang their arguments are also based on the say-so of one or two people with a possible axe to grind.
Since these people are rarely, if ever, named, it gets difficult to refute what they say.
From the link you post when Salman Pak comes up:
In an interview on October 14, 2001, conducted jointly by the Times and “Frontline,†the public-television program, Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the September 11th operation “was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam,†and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified only as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.
In separate interviews with me, however, a former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty-five people. (At the time, Iran and Iraq were at war, and America favored Iraq.) Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britain’s MI6. The C.I.A. offered similar training in counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. “We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison,†the former station chief told me. Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an airplane—which appeared to be used for counter-terrorism training—when they visited a biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in 1991, ten years before September 11th. It is, of course, possible for such a camp to be converted from one purpose to another. The former C.I.A. official noted, however, that terrorists would not practice on airplanes in the open. “That’s Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,†the former agent said. “They train in basements. You don’t need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing.â€
"Says you, says me."
Go back to almost any news story trumpeting the "Bush lied" point of view, and you will find the sources are almost always one or two unidentified people "linked to American intelligence." Why are these sources any more reliable? Or unbiased?
Go back through all the links you've posted to deny Iraq's terrorism links, possession of WMD, and the rest. What are the sources? Do they have names? How many sources were there? Are different news stories using the same unnamed sources? How would you know?
