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"We have zero confirmation that the poison gas in question reported in al-Hayat even came from Syria..."

Actually, the fact is that we have no confirmation that there was any poison gas at all, and that was the thrust of my post. If there had been a large amount of a serious chemical weapon found, such as sarin, tabun, soman, VX, etc., that would be a major developement and we would heard some kind of confirmation by now.

To clarify, I don't generally consider the use of cyanide gas to be an effective chemical agent of mass lethality ("could have killed 20,000") when dispersed in open areas via a bomb. Nor would I consider the discovery of a nominal amount (say 20 pounds) of VX nerve agent to be a significant find, under these circumstances.

However, I do agree with your points 1-5.

--Boot Hill

Al-Hayat claims that there was and at least some of their information regarding the car and truck bombs appears to have panned out as genuine. I don't take a lack of official confirmation as being too disturbing in this instance, given that the Jordanians may not have the facilities necessary to analyze whatever it was they found. Zarqawi's last planned round of chemical attacks was also in Europe, so the European agencies are likely to have the best hands-on experience in dealing with these folks. We have been told very, very little about the specifics of this plot even on the conventional angle, suggesting at least to me that the possibility of a Jordanian-mandated news blackout should not be ruled.

Regarding the 20,000 casualty count figure, I think that's more of an expression of the intended scale of the attack rather than any kind of a scientific figure. Everything we've seen from official Jordanian sources (including the king, and you don't get more official than that) suggests that thousands would have been killed had these attacks gone through, a definitively an indication that whatever this was, it was something major.