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At the risk of going the way of phaser... why would the Administration sit on it while the potential political and diplomatic costs of having possibly lied about WMDs escalate?

Good question. the same reason Bush and Co didn't explain there battle plan. They care more about the end result than the politics.

Releasing information prematurely complicates any investigation. the investigation of this scale is going to require chasing down good leads as well as false leads. It is going to require determining if someone is cooperating. Like any investigation the people doing it are better off if they don't have to beat the press to every potential site, if they can use the private information they currently have to verfiy statements made by others, if they can use the threat of imprisonment to get folks talking.

There are countless reasons why the investigation itself would be less effective if the press were given a full detailed report of its progress each day.

When everyone was yelling what was taking Bush so long to go to war with Iraq, Bush stayed silent about his intentions even though he had a plan. Some have forgotten but Tony Blair on the other hand virtually announced the exact date. The same thing occured here. While everyone is attacking Bush and Blair on what is going on, Tony Blair explained that it would all come out at once.

At the risk of going the way of phaser... why would the Administration sit on it while the potential political and diplomatic costs of having possibly lied about WMDs escalate?

What "political and diplomatic costs" are you talking about? You present that as if it were a truism, yet I don't see the WMD issue hurting Bush at all.

And as I pointed out previously, phaser didn't run afoul of the "thought police", he was obviously a previously banned poster.

You may well be right about the "political costs," TomB, but i'm guessing the Democrats don't think so, and so it becomes at least a small issue for Bush and Co., in that the press has picked up the WMD issue and will be persistent in asking about it. Even a simple "we're putting together our case" would defuse a good amount of this press, but instead this Administration engaged its usual routine - make bold statements, then backtrack from them (why do they do that!?). I don't know about the press argument, VRWC - the flood of stories coming from Iraq during the war has slowed to a trickle.

When everyone was yelling what was taking Bush so long to go to war with Iraq

Who was that? For many, quite the opposite - what was the rush? And that's a big part of this WMD thing - the Administration claimed deposing Saddam was urgent, yet two months in we haven't found any WMDs. We may still find them, or they may be building their case, but will that represent the imminent threat to the U.S. that Saddam supposedly represented.