By Matt Hurley for the TIB Network:
No, this isn't about any Connections. It is about just who mislead whom about who was actually responsible for 9/11. We've all heard prominent Democrats say that the Bush administration put the idea in people's heads that Saddam had a hand in that tragic day. There is a new article coming out that suggests a different source: the media and their polls.The authors examined every publicly available survey question asking Americans whether Hussein might be responsible for the attacks, concluding that this "mistaken belief was already widespread among Americans long before President Bush began publicly linking Saddam Hussein with the war on terror." They also found that the number of Americans blaming Saddam "has been dropping ever since the first days following 9/11.""When Osama Became Saddam: Origins and Consequences of the Change in America's Public Enemy number 1" will appear in the October issue of PS: Political Science and Politics.
The authors show that the wording of opinion surveys exaggerated the extent of these misperceptions. The earliest surveys indicate that Americans spontaneously mentioned Osama bin Laden as the main person responsible for the attacks. Other questions asked only about Saddam, forcing "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."
"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."
Sources / Resources
Press Release
American Political Science Association's website
