Interesting Article On Why Many Americans Believed Saddam Was Behind the 9-11 AttacksThis is a much-mentioned meme on the Left; Al Gore included it in
his speech the other day:
I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.Here's what a honors candidate at the University of Illinois and her professor found when
they dug into the polling story:
According to the researchers, the story of widespread popular misconceptions about Saddam’s role in the September 2001 attacks grabbed headlines in the national media around the first anniversary of the attacks. This “discovery” was startling at the time, the researchers wrote, and many commentators suggested that the majorities of Americans who blamed Saddam for the attacks had somehow been misled by the Bush administration.
In contrast to this popular account, Althaus and Largio found that the number of Americans willing to blame Saddam “has been dropping ever since the first days following 9/11.” After examining every publicly available survey question that asked Americans whether Hussein might be responsible for the attacks, they concluded that this “mistaken belief was already widespread among Americans long before President Bush began publicly linking Saddam Hussein with the war on terror.”The authors also show that the wording of opinion surveys exaggerated how widespread these misperceptions were. The very earliest surveys in the days immediately after Sept. 11 showed that Americans spontaneously mentioned Osama bin Laden as the main person responsible for the attacks. Other questions in those surveys asked only about Saddam and “forced survey respondents to pick an option. In response to those questions, as many as eight in 10 Americans appeared willing to believe Saddam could have had a hand in the terror attacks.”
After September 2001, pollsters switched from recording spontaneous responses to presenting respondents with “forced-choice” questions. This switch, “probably made in order to more efficiently process the survey data, had the unintended effect of exaggerating the degree to which Americans saw a connection between Hussein and the attacks,” Althaus said.
In addition, most polls only permitted respondents to assess the likelihood that Saddam was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Only one poll allowed respondents a range of options. This poll, sponsored by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, revealed that about one in five Americans believed Saddam was directly involved in the attacks.
“It appears that rather than becoming duped, as the popular account has it, the American public has gradually grown more critical of the idea that Hussein had a hand in 9/11,” the researchers wrote. “Rather than showing a gullible public blindly accepting the rationales offered by an administration bent on war, our analysis reveals a self-correcting public that has grown ever more doubtful of Hussein’s culpability since the 9/11 attacks.”Here's a link to the
actual report (PDF file). Particularly interesting is their finding that the percentage of people expressing a belief in Saddam's involvement declined steadily over time and that the belief was highest immediately after 9-11. Despite the Left's fevered fantasies, the notion of Saddam being behind the attacks did not come from disinformation put out by the Bush White House.
