@Glenn - thanks, yes, after I posted, I saw that exchange you had with Calamine(?). I think you and I are in agreement, although Powell's speech to the UN should have been a somewhat exceptional moment when it might have been appropriate to reveal sources otherwise usually left more secure. Not that he did any of that, he just drank Cheney's Curveball kool-aid, and peed all over the rest of us when he was done.

@Scuzza - I am not sure what you are accusing me of. I nowhere make the assumption that the truth is being told here - I was asking a hypothetical. Don't be so quick to impugn my motives. This is what I was warning of by bringing up the concern troll thing in the first place. Maybe read some of my past letters before you assume that I am a willing dupe of government propoganda. But if Iran is, in fact, pursuing nuclear weapons, I would ABSOLUTELY want my country's government, military, and intelligence sources to know this prior to a nuclear detonation - test or otherwise. (Just in case it is unclear, I am an American, by the way.) I don't know what course of action I would recommend in such an event, and I am not advocating anything of that sort here.

@Baldie - I am not talking about the site at Qom, but the supposed knowledge of Iran's motivation in revealing the site. If, for example, there were some meeting of Iranian leadership at which it was discussed as a matter of course - "Oh, yes, we now know that the US knows about the Qom site, so we had better report it to the IAEA," AND we knew about this meeting, it would reveal two important things about our intelligence to proffer such knowledge: (1) that we knew about that meeting, and (2) that we now had some information about whatever intelligence Iran had (how did they find out what we knew?). The issue I was raising was that if we had these intelligence sources and knowledge, it would make no sense to reveal them in order to curb a news cycle - ESPECIALLY when no one in the mainstream media seems to be asking about them.

I would love to see someone ask about them, if only to get the answer - "We can't answer that for reasons of national security," or some such.

All I was doing was raising the question. With Glenn's major point, that the media and public seem to be swallowing the story with no evidence, I agree completely. The only thing I was saying is that skepticism also might indicate the fact that the lack of facts in popular consumption is not necessarily an indicator that the facts don't exist - especially when dealing with the intelligence community.

I am not assuming that such facts exist - only that the lack of evidence works both ways. I just want to see better questions asked.

Glenn, I haven't read the whole comments thread. I am quite possibly going to be accused of concern-trolling. I can only ask you to believe that my intentions are pure, thus relieving me of the central characteristic of a troll.

I was just playing this out in my mind, and I was wondering: how would we - as a country, as a nation-state with intelligence agencies and geo-political interests often advanced through intrigue and guile - go about asserting positively what another nation has done or not done when we have gathered that evidence through means covert and deceptive?

For this particular instance: if we have affirmative evidence about Iran's intentions, it is because we either have an active intelligence agent in Iran's leadership or with access to their leadership, or we have a means of accessing files - computer or otherwise - which contain information regarding their leadership's intentions and thoughts. How on earth do you expose the take from those methods and not lose that capability?

Don't get me wrong - media outlets and independent organizations and the like should still be following the path of skepticism you have advocated here - particularly in light of the recent history with iRaq. But if the CIA, DIA, NSA or whoever in the intelligence community wants to either (a) withhold proof, or (b) engage in misdirection in order to protect capabilities, sources, and methods, I don't think I have a problem with that.

I am not quarreling with the central assertion you have made in this essay - that there has been no proof offered for something that is being asserted as a fact in multiple outlets - just bringing a different question to light about the possibility for an existence of proof and its lack of disclosure.