I listed the sources that I was talking about. If you go to this Frontline page, (admittedly dated) and browse for a while, you can find a lot more people who analyzed the situation and came to similar conclusions.

You discount the sources because they belong to an anti-Saddam group. Not sure where I can go from there, unless I get one of his sons to testify.

As yet, I have not seen any itemization of opposing sources from you in your posts other than the two anonymous people discussed in the Hersh article. Although he says the interviews were separate, there is no indication that the two interviewees were not connected to each other, or even, if you're cynical about these things, that they exist.

Needless to say, I think we can discount official pronouncements from members of Saddam's regime.

How about listing the sources you have that state that Saddam never supported terrorism? I'm primarily thinking of Salman Pax here, but if you want to go into the AAI, you can. How many are there altogether?

But suppose we stipulate that it IS underdetermined, as you claim it is.

Then if it is, we can not say that there was clear and convincing data on the terrorist links.

And if that is our mutual conclusion, then does that not imply that our justifications for this war were flawed, not based off fact and a matter of opinion or belief?

Almost all intelligence work involves some interpretation. A written memo in Saddam's handwriting authorizing a money transfer to Osama or Hamas would be nice, but it's hard enough to find such things after we took over Iraq, and it's not bloody likely you would find it while Saddam was still in power.

And if you have information--not hard objective evidence--from one group of sources (including intelligence analysis) that says Saddam supports terrorism both in the Mideast and elsewhere, and has access to WMD, and other sources that say--again without objective evidence--that Saddam wouldn't dream of such a thing, and you're the President of the United States, which direction do you err in?

There are lives at stake both ways. We can see the lives the removal of Saddam cost. Obviously, we would never know how many lives of Americans and other allies were saved if the terrorism link is proven (we've already stipulated that Iraqi lives saved don't count).

Remember, you and your intelligence agencies just got a boatload of grief for not making the right guesses based on fuzzy information before 9/11.