WASHINGTON — The best information about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is probably in the hands of American officials sent to assist in the investigation. But they will say nothing.

In an odd twist, some of the world’s foremost experts on crash investigations, radar and the inner workings of the Boeing 777 are in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital — but technically only to assist the Malaysian government, and they are being scrupulously low-key. If a similar event happened in the United States, they would be gathering information from different parties and knitting it together into a progress report. But in the Malaysian case, at least so far, the Americans do not appear to have played any such role, and information is dribbling out, sometimes in contradictory fashion, from the government, the airline and the military.