I'll be in transit again much of today, and I probably won't be posting much this weekend.

I was hoping that someone somewhere would post excerpts from a story in today's Wall Street Journal (the news section, not the hard-right editorial page) that seems to debunk some claims made to justify the Iraq war. Here's the summary from the WSJ's home page:

Iraqi scientists who say they were involved in a 1990 ricin project that was abandoned nearly as soon as it began are coming forward to challenge Washington's claims, and significant parts of their story are backed by other evidence.

I haven't ponied up for an online WSJ subscription, so I haven't read the story and I can't excerpt it, but its author was on Morning Edition this morning, and if you're of a mind to, you can listen to what he says here (scroll down to "Report: Iraq Ricin Program Abandoned in Late '90s" -- an inaccurate headline because, as NPR's own summary notes, Iraq, according to the WSJ story, abandoned the project in late 1990).

By the way, as CNN reported at the time, Europeans were skeptical back in February when Colin Powell claimed that ricin found by police in a London apartment had come from Iraq.

Morning Edition also had a good report on the government's own highly critical assessment of Iraq reconstruction efforts (scroll to "Pentagon Control of Post-War Iraq Criticized"). A couple of print stories on this are here and here.