Month: February 2005

Two-thirds of SOTU Watchers Were Idiots

Jon Ponder

Guardian UK:

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 66 percent of people who watched his State of the Union speech said his Social Security proposals will move the country in the right direction. That’s up from 51 percent of Americans surveyed before the speech. Three in four said Bush made a “convincing case” that the government needs to take action in the next couple of years to change the system.

The telephone survey of 485 speech watchers, conducted Wednesday, had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

CIA Admits Iraq Had No Chemical Weapons

Jon Ponder

So now will all the wingnuts apologize for lambasting folks like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and others who dared contract the Bush Administration’s bogus claims in the run-up to the war? Not bloody likely.

Concord Monitor:

In a formal acknowledgment of the obvious, the CIA has issued a classified report revising its prewar assessments on Iraq and concluding that Baghdad abandoned its chemical weapons programs in 1991, according to intelligence officials familiar with the document.

The report marks the first time the CIA officially has disavowed its prewar judgments, and is one in a “series” of updated assessments the agency is producing as part of a belated effort to correct its record on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs, officials said.

For an agency that prides itself on providing the latest intelligence to policymakers, even the title of the new report reads like a year-old headline: “Iraq: No Large-Scale Chemical Warfare Efforts Since Early 1990s.”