Video believed to have been in U.S. government hands somehow pops up on a website alleged to be an Al Qaeda mouthpiece, and U.S. government officials hold it up as a reason to cower in fear before the threat of another major terrorist attack on American soil.

One immediate effect of the incident was CBS's decision yesterday to impose a delay of several seconds on its live coverage of the Grammy Awards show this Sunday.

Also today, it emerged that a ricin-laced letter addressed to the White House was intercepted three months ago.

My belief is that right up to the publication of the dossier there was a unified view amongst not only my own staff but all the DIS experts that on the basis of the intelligence available to them the assessment that Iraq possessed a CW or BW capability should be carefully caveated.
But we were told there was other intelligence that we, the experts, could not see, and that it removed the reservations we were expressing. It was so sensitive it could not be shown to us.

The Capitol police chief, Terrance Gainer, told reporters last night that two out of three tests conducted on the powder indicated ricin. The third test came out negative, and a fourth and more definitive test was under way, with results expected today.