More Americans still believe Saddam linked to Sept 11: poll

WASHINGTON, Sept 6 (AFP) - Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had a role in the September 11 attacks, according to a Washington Post poll out Saturday.

The Bush administration portrayed the war on Iraq as a continuation of the war on terrorism launched after al-Qaeda's attacks on the United States, which killed 3,000 people.

BizVantage – A Net clipping service that learns what you need: for business, investment or technology.
Try the free, no-hassle 6 month trial!

On September 25, 2002 Bush warned against the danger that "al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness." National security counselor Condoleezza Rice added that there "clearly are contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq." The next day Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said there was "bulletproof evidence" of an al-Qaeda-Saddam link.

But no solid proof has yet to emerge linking Saddam's regime to the Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, and top US officials have stopped mentioning the link as a reason for going to war.

Why do Americans continue to believe there is a link? "It's very easy to picture Saddam as a demon," John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, told the Post.

"You get a general fuzz going around: People know they don't like al Qaeda, they are horrified by September 11th, they know (Saddam) is a bad guy, and it's not hard to put those things together."

Eighty-two percent of those polled by the Post also believed that Saddam had provided assistance to bin Laden and his network, and 78 percent believe that Saddam had already developed weapons of mass destruction.

The Washington Post poll of 1,003 adults nationwide was conducted from August 7 to the 11th, and has margin of error of plus or minus three percent.

ch/jfs

US-attacks-Iraq