This piece from the Oz discusses divisions within the US Administration over whether to release intelligence information. The story is attributed to the Sunday Times, but I couldn’t find it at their site. The discussion is pretty much identical to my posts of last week, which Ken Parish dismissed as ‘ridiculously premature’. On the assumption that bloggers are entitled to be more speculative than mainstream media like The Times, and that no-one wants to read blog speculation that lags what’s already in print, I’d say I published just in time. Here’s the Oz

Washington’s apparent reluctance to produce what it has claimed is “solid” evidence of Iraqi transgressions has fuelled speculation that the intelligence is flawed or owes more to propaganda than genuine information.

Scepticism has been fuelled by uneventful inspection visits to several nuclear and biological sites that were previously identified as suspect by the US or Britain. UN officials have so far not disclosed any serious irregularities. British officials admit the intelligence they have seen is not as dramatic or as easy to publish as the satellite photos that exposed the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

“The evidence is assembled from random bits and pieces, quite a lot of which cannot be explicitly revealed,” an official said. “It adds up to a picture we are confident of.”

The Oz observes

Spreading that confidence to a wider public is beginning to prove a problem

I can only agree.