>Sorry, I missed that. While Iraq is a big place, al Qaqaa was well known to us. If I've missed the meaning of your post, I apologize.

No, I just meant that people who are now talking about the missing 400 tons of explosive are finding it quite believable that weapons could be moved/hidden and not found even though they definitely existed at one point - because that promotes political talking points, but the same people will tell you if we haven't found WMDs there never were any.

Knowing stuff like that with any certainty is tough. Rummy would say "That falls into the category of the things we don't know that we know we don't know." <s> The jury is still out on a lot of this. I think "we" in the sense of the intelligence agencies of the various good-guys may know some things, but the public does not have a need to know - however much it might be fun, or make good television or effect the election.

A point I made earlier - neither Truman nor Eisenhower ever let on about the Venona intercept ( the bugging of the Russian's communication cable in Berlin ) even though it would have been a wonderful thing to trot out some of the product during the Hiss or Rosenberg trials.

Britain made some *very* tough decisions to protect Enigma.

'Public Opinion' about WMD in Iraq ( or anywhere else ) has no real bearing one way or another on the reality, whatever that is. But there are some very serious people who aren't paying much attention to what the man on the street thinks.

I am very comforted by that.