Kerry has a lot of ammunition going into Friday's debate. He has proved in the past that he can go for the throat and I explained earlier why things are looking bleak for Bush.
According to Zogby's new poll Bush was behind (in many cases far behind) in 13 of the 16 battleground states, with Kerry cutting into the lead in the other 3.
Bush also had to contend with Republican Party scandals and as smart posters pointed out that the media finally realizes that they want to be "on the winning side".
If you want to see more about the earlier press and diary, check out:
TimDauwalter's Diary
The current story can be found at the Washington Post
The Washington Post has the goods on the report:
On Nuclear Weapons:
Despite the U.S. intelligence judgment that Iraq in 2002 had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, Duelfer reported that after 1991, Baghdad's nuclear program had "progressively decayed." He added that the Iraq Survey Group investigators had found no evidence "to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program." Duelfer concluded that his team "uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapons research and development activities since 1991."
On Biological Weapons:
Duelfer's report is the first U.S. intelligence assessment to state flatly that Iraq had secretly destroyed its biological weapons stocks in the early 1990s. By 1995, though, and under U.N. pressure, it abandoned its efforts. The document rules out the possibility that biological weapons might have been hidden, or perhaps smuggled into another country, and it finds no evidence of secret biological laboratories or ongoing research that could be firmly linked to a weapons program. The team also found no evidence of stocks of the smallpox virus, which the administration had claimed it had.
On Chemical Weapons:
Duelfer's report said that no chemical weapons existed and that there is no evidence of attempts to make such weapons over the past 12 years. Iraq retained dual-use equipment that could be used for such an effort. "The issue is that he has chemical weapons, and he's used them," Cheney told CNN in March 2002. The National Intelligence Estimate said that "although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents -- much of it added in the last year." The report determined that unanswered questions were almost certainly the result of poor accounting.
Democrats are lining up to pounce, led by Sen. John Edwards and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV.
Now it's Kerry's turn, and we need to do all we can to help him.