Quite a few pro-war bloggers, notably including Glenn Reynolds and Tim Blair, have opined that bin Laden is dead and that the recent tape is therefore a fake. I think that they are probably right. But this means, obviously, that the US intelligence analysts who declared the tape genuine are misinforming us, or aren’t very competent. So presumably when Powell presents us with audio evidence, vetted by US intelligence, we should be sceptical. For example, audio evidence of Iraqi officers discussing WMDs.

As far as I can tell, if we discard the phone intercepts, nothing in Powell’s dossier of a week ago is left intact. The in-depth British analysis of Iraqi intelligence turned out to be the products of a Google search, subjected to a quick and dirty piece of spin doctoring by Blair’s in-house team. The supposedly current data was actually a decade old. The Al Ansar chemical weapons factory turned out to be an invention of their local opponents. The Al Qaeda link was evaporating until someone decided to channel bin Laden himself to back it up. The photographs of trucks were photographs of trucks.

Maybe in all of this there’s something solid. But when even Tim Blair and Glenn Reynolds think the Administration is lying, it’s hard to see why anyone else should believe them.