Why is it that when asked by any public official, “Trust me, would I lie?” it is the natural inclination of many Americans to do just the opposite?

Call it the jaded lens of experience. After all, the last time Americans have followed that advice it produced the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the Iran-Contra Affair, and a few less pharmaceutical factories in Sudan.

Why then should one be inclined to trust the very shaky evidence the Bush administration has thus far put forth as vindication of their “solid intelligence” of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, despite no smoking gun uncovered now more than two months after the end of hostilities?

Indeed, let’s run through the evidence we have so far. Of most recent significance is the much-vaunted “two trailers,” claimed to be evidence of a clandestine Iraqi bioweapons program and thus conclusive proof of the administration’s charges. Yet upon closer inspection, the certainty that these trailers point to an illicit weapons program proves to be highly suspect and based mostly upon conjecture.

For instance, the New York Times reports weapons experts have pointed out the trailers lacked a gear for steam sterilization, a critical feature for any facility producing biological organisms, weaponized or not. While according to some analysts, caustic agents could be used instead of steam to sterilize the tanks, such a process would require a thorough rinsing with copious amounts of sterile water afterwards — a difficult commodity to come by in the middle of a desert.

Furthermore, the design of these trailers would allow them to produce only a very small amount of germ-infested liquid which would require transportation to other facilities for further concentration and weaponizing. Making matters more complicated is the fact that such fluids would be quite difficult for technicians to remove from the alleged fermenting tanks, making the trailers highly inefficient as mobile bioweapons laboratories.

Comparably, the trailers were equipped to easily extract gasses, providing at the least some coherency to the Iraqi account that the trailers were in fact for producing hydrogen for weather balloons.

Naturally, the administration has an explanation for all of these discrepancies: The sterilized steam could have been provided from separate, not-as-of-yet discovered mobile facilities. Yet most of their rebuttal isn’t nearly so explicitly reasoned —rather, it comes in the form of brazen fiat, such as Colin Powell’s unqualified assertion that he has “no doubt whatsoever” of WMD in Iraq, repeatedly going back to the voluminous intelligence he has relied upon in coming to this conclusion, despite the fact that quality of such intelligence is at the very heart of the debate.

Other tactics have simply claimed that critics are ignorant; that they lack the intelligence and access of intelligence officials. Yet the skepticism being waged has nothing to do with classified information — what is quite plainly being pointed out is the rather significant suspensions of disbelief required to turn seemingly mundane objects into weapons of mass destruction. Says one weapons analyst of the trailers in question, “Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that’s true of any tin can.”

Yet this seems to be the pattern of evidence so far turned up on Iraq’s WMD programs — consider now the massive stockpiles of chemical weapons Iraq was accused of still possessing. So far, the best evidence turned up has been large quantities of pesticides found in military bunkers — meaning if any kind of chemical weapons program was going on, it appears to be far more primitive and store-bought than Americans were ever led to believe. Indeed, if Roundup loaded on a missile constitutes a “weapon of mass destruction,” then clearly the number of “rogue states” capable of acquiring WMD will multiply exponentially overnight.

Thus, the evidence presented to the American public has been a pattern of the highly improbable to the highly circumstantial, for example, items such as chemical suits and manuals which could just as well be relics of a pre-1991 program or any program pre-dating Iraq’s final mandate to disarm.

While it does not exclude the possibility that Iraq did indeed possess WMD up until their American-imposed deadline, if this is the best evidence the American government can put forth of Iraq’s WMD stockpiles, to call our intelligence data solid on the matter is not simply an absurdity, but as philosopher Jeremy Bentham once put it, “an absurdity on stilts.”

Americans should demand of the Bush administration a more full account of the quality and nature of intelligence on Iraq’s forbidden weapons stockpiles — not just more “absurdities on stilts.”