<p>Ari Fleischer (White House Press Secretary), September 26, 2002:
</p>
<p>And of course, the “Feith” memo by the Bush Administration’s Office of Special Plans, leaked to the Weekly Standard, which summed it up for the gullible as follows:
You see, Fundingfather, the Bush Administration had a bigger problem with regard to the Iraq-9/11 linkage they wanted to convince the American public of than they did with WMD’s: I think they really thought that there were some WMD’s there, somewhere. The lied about the extent of the evidence which existed to support that belief, but I think they really believed that there was at least some tiny kernel of truth there somewhere. But the Iraq-9/11 link had been soundly and unambiguously debunked from day 1 - or at least day 10 - September 21, 2001, and our intelligence agencies didn’t equivocate on that one, despite pressure from the White House. So they couldn’t really come right out and say that, as much as they wanted to. So they hinted at it. They implied it. They said thing’s like “We’re not sure.” In fact, they were sure. The problem was, they were sure that what they wanted America to believe was a lie. So there they had to resort to less direct means of persuasion.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t mean that their message was not clear, was not intentional, and was not actually successful. “Plausible deniability” is one thing. The truth is another. The Bush Administration did everything in their power to make Americans believe that Saddam played an important role in 9/11. The various quotes I’ve cited show that; anyone who lived in America in 2002-2003 knows that. Even though the actual evidence contradicted that. And the Republican viewers of Fox News were the most fertile ground for that lie to grow in. People who got their news elsewhere were less vulnerable to being lied to. What does that teach you?</p>
<p>kluge, you are confusing two things: a 9/11 linkage and the threat posed by the “nexus of terrorism” and a state sponsor with WMDs. One was backward looking and one forward looking. The administration never said that Iraq played an important roll in 9/11 as your phony study maintained. </p>
<p>As far as a forward looking warning about the connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, the intelligence that was available before 2003 certainly pointed to it and the post-war intelligence has confirmed this. A perfectly reasonable stance could be one of acknowledging that such a threat exists but it is not worth war to avoid. I can understand that perspective. (However, I’m sure that those who took it would have been the first to point fingers at the administration for “failure to connect the dots” should the threat ever materialize into a WMD attack against the US.) However, to continually assert that the threat did not exist in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary is simple political gamesmanship. To go even further and claim that this threat was nothing buts lies is blatantly dishonest and dishonorable.</p>
<p>Here are the relevant questions and answers given between May and September, 2003 from the “phony” study:
</p>
<p>And finally Question 15 that you’ve seized upon as “evidence” that the study was “phony”, which was only asked in one survey, conducted in January, 2003:
</p>
<p>So, FF, how do you weasel your way out of that? You nitpicked the language of question 15, but what’s your explanation of the answers to questions 4, 5 & 6, which is what the conclusion with regard to Fox viewer’s misinformation was based on?</p>
<p>but that does not say explicitly “saddam helped plan it. signed, Dubya” it just says what people think was said. u are dancing around the question.</p>
<p>Q4: nebulously worded responses; one could eliminate the 1st and last response, but the 2nd and 3rd are open to interpretation with perhaps neither answer being entirely accurate. </p>
<p>Q5: same thing - nebulously worded; a “well informed person” could know BOTH that the level of weapons as indicated by Powell were not found AND know that some Gulf War-era munitions were found. In this case, since the “Has” answer is more technically correct, they could have chosen that answer. However, knowing both bits of information does not make one ill-informed. Anyone who knows anything about polling knows that ambiguity in a question results in inaccurate results. If one really wanted to know the answer to the question, rather than to trick someone into giving what they have determined to be a “wrong” answer, they would have worded the question: “Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found the stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as predicted by Colin Powell in his UN speech”. The answer to that would be an unambiguous, “no”.</p>
<p>Q6: Once again, poorly worded. What is “working closely”? Could they have worked closely on one terror project but not another? </p>
<p>All-in-all, this is either a very shoddy study or a blatantly biased one. The reason I highlighted question 15 is that because the wording of that is so blatantly wrong, that I would lean toward the assumption that the entire study is blatantly biased since its wording goes way beyond shoddy. I could easily craft a study which revolved around typical errors or exaggerations posed by the Dems and “prove” that all of the other news sources typically frequented by liberals were feeding deceptive lies. Heck, I could even limit the participants to the more-educated people here on CC and prove that.</p>
<p>As far as the Rice statement, sheesh, kluge, don’t you get that for one to make a credible forward-looking warning that you need historical perspective to back it up? The key thing was that she was NOT trying to make a case for Saddam’s involvement with 9/11 (past) but WAS making a case for the FUTURE threat that Saddam working with al Qaeda posed.</p>
<p>FF, you strain out gnats while swallowing camels. What exactly is “nebuous” about: “Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11th attacks” - a statement 22% of respondents considered to be “the best description of the relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaeda? And why do you suppose 22% of the public thought that? Who do you think gave them that idea?</p>
<p>We didn’t find WMD’s in Iraq. The fact that abandoned pre-Gulf war shells with detectable amounts of degraded chemicals in them (which our own military didn’t consider dangerous) were (predictably) found in various locations in Iraq after the invasion wasn’t released to the public until 2006, so the responders to these surveys would not have been relying on it. (No reasonable person would anyway, but it’s not even a tinfoil hat-level theory for a survey conducted in the summer of 2003.) </p>
<p>Saddam never “worked closely” with al Qaeda on anything. The link from the Iraqi documents project you cited elsewhere makes that clear:
<br>
Keep straining those gnats. And by all means, swallow all the camels you like. The rest of us have gotten off that bus.</p>
<p>people can and do assume things. you seem to think the majority of americans a. are knowledgeable about politics and b. answer surveys if they have enough information to back up their response. both are sadly false in our country. people are not informed. any difference in how a question is asked or even what order it comes in in a set of questions affects the results. in general, people do not know what they are talking about. you have not given proof taht the government said explicitly that Saddam was involved directly in 9/11. hearsay and survey results do not serve as proof, because you hold the false basic assumption that surveys are legitimate at all.</p>
<p>ExplorerCY, I actually said that Bush and the high level members of his administration were carefully not to say that Saddam was directly involved in 9/11. That’s because they knew he wasn’t. What I have said is that they wanted Americans to believe that it was true even though they knew it was false, and they did everything they could to encourage that belief without actually making the direct statement. Looser cannons like Douglas Feith were less circumspect. Feith leaked a memo full of half-truths and distortions which had been flatly rejected by higher ups, reported in the Weekly Standard thus:
</p>
<p>No, Bush never said “Saddam was behind 9/11.” But he made sure that at least 20+% of American’s not only heard that, but believed it. As Frank Luntz, the Republicans’ propaganda wunderkind puts it: “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.” And they heard the message. You probably did, too. Think back - wasn’t there a time when you just sort of believed that Saddam was involved in 9/11 somehow?</p>
<p>nope. as a rational person, i could tell the difference. i think most people knew that saddam wasn’t flying to any caves and sittin round the campfire, roasting mashmellows with al qaeda and planning word domination.</p>
<p>ExplorerCY, that’s what everybody says now. Who were the 80% of Fox News viewers either believed that WMD’s had been found, or that Iraq was involved in 9/11, or that the rest of the world applauded our invasion of Iraq? 80% got at least one wrong. Here’s the individual breakdown: “Is it your impression that the US has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization?” 67% of Fox viewers bought that one. 33% of Fox viewers believed that WMD’s - you know, the WMD’s we invaded Iraq over - had actually been found. 35% of Fox viewers erroneously believed that the rest of the world supported our going to war. 54% of Republicans who relied on Fox News got all three wrong, even though even the Bush Administration had admitted by then (after the invasion) that none of those things were true. 54% When it comes to disinformation, there’s no question who’s number 1 - Fox News. </p>
<p>PIPA wasn’t the only organization to document the falsely held beliefs, only the most thorough. Here are some other polls from 2003:
<p>“We learn more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s,” Cheney said, “that it involved training, for example, on [biological and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems.”</p>
<p>That is a quote from Dick Cheney to Tim Russert in an interview on Meet the Press.</p>
<p>Mr. Cheney also stated to the Capitol Report “There clearly was a relationship (between Iraq/Hussein and Al Qaeda). It’s been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. t goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials.”</p>
<p>“The press, with all due respect, (is) often times lazy, often times simply reports what somebody else in the press said without doing their homework.”</p>
<p>Members of 9/11 commission found “no credible evidence” that Iraq was involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks carried out by al Qaeda hijackers, and they concluded that there was “no collaborative relationship” between Iraq and Osama bin Laden, the network’s leader, according to details of its findings.</p>
<p>Though Saddam was not directly involved in the attacks, the administration was correct that Saddam’s Iraq harbored terrorists.
Bush is your light and inspiration.
and ballgame!</p>
<p>Actually, ExplorerCY, the original question was, “Will you be more ignorant after watching Fox News than you were before?” FF posted the actually somewhat non sequitur question about exactly what Bush & Co. said to make people think that Saddam was involved with 9/11 when the Administration knew he wasn’t.</p>
<p>I don’t know why FF brought that up, but I thank him for doing so.</p>
<p>Kluge, you have provided no evidence to support this assertion. Neither President Bush nor any ranking administrator in his administration stated that Saddam played a part in 9/11. Your assertion is nonsense. </p>
<p>President Bush and others in his administration have stated that some members of Al Qaeda were in Iraq. That was a true statement. Merely because an Al Qaeda cell might exist in Iraq does not mean Saddam was behind 9/11 and no one in the Bush administration suggested this. You are only hearing what you want to hear and not listening to what the Bush administation actually said.</p>
<p>None of what you quoted supports your position that President Bush or VP Cheney said Saddam was behind 9/11.</p>
Why do you think that over 30% of the country thinks that the governement was complicit in 9/11 and who gave them this idea? The answer is that there is a large percent of the country that is sadly uninformed and will cling to a view despite contradictory evidence. To assume a causal effect for this phenomenon by linking to what their news source is a stretch. </p>
<p>I could create a survey that asks questions about US involvement in 9/11, Iran’s connections with al Qaeda, etc. and get all of the uninformed lefties to take the bait and then “prove” that CNN or NPR or whatever their source is is spewing disinformation. I wouldn’t even have to lie like this study did in its formulation for question 15. </p>
<p>This is precisely what this study set out to do with its selection of questions (only using questions that a conservative is more likely to have wrong) and their wording. You can continue to cling to it if you wish if it feeds your ego about conservatives and Fox, but it proves absolutely nothing about either.</p>