by TChris

Thanks to "carefully worded hints" from the Bush Administration before the invasion of Iraq, 70 percent of Americans thought the administration had knowledge that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. It turns out that the administration's evidence was even more dubious than the intelligence supporting the claim that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

A Knight Ridder Newspapers review of the Bush administration statements on Iraq's ties to terrorism and what is currently known about the classified intelligence has found that administration advocates of a pre-emptive invasion frequently hyped sketchy and sometimes false information to make their case. On two occasions, they neglected to report information that painted a less sinister picture.

The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence concluded in a January 2003 report that, despite occasional meetings between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorism network, the meetings never produced an "operational relationship."

“We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al-Qaida,” a senior U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity, because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing to the White House.

If the administration had shared the results of that report prior to the war, the 70 percent who concluded that Saddam shared responsibility for 9/11 may not have been duped. But duping was necessary to build support for the war, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, the administration continues to defend its prewar descriptions of Hussein as a terrorist threat.