Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD & 43% of people connect Saddam to 9/11!

Right below is the CNN transcript which verifies that 43% of "Americans actually believe that Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader, was directly connected to 9/11 almost five years ago" and says that "the belief is powerfully related to education." This is a very interesting and alarming transcript in my opinion!

Below the CNN transcript is a Washington Post article from 8/7/06 titled "Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD."

This is must read material in my opinion because it shows how uninformed that many voters are, it shows that Bush and the very powerful extreme right wing media are connecting their misleading message with many people, and it shows that Democrats definitely have their work cut out for them to connect the truth about these important facts to the voters!

With so many uninformed voters and with so much that is on the line in this election, Democrats cannot just count on "being right" alone to win back power in at least one branch of Congress in November. They have to be able to effectively connect "being right" with the voters through Bush's speeches, through the very well articulated RNC, and through a very powerful Rush Limbaugh and extreme right wing media!

If Democrats cannot effectively connect "being right" with the voters and fail to win back power in at least one branch of Congress in November, it will be for the wrong reasons as is clearly shown below!

Please forward this on so that all Democrats will be aware of these very important and alarming statistics. Nothing can be taken for granted in this election in my opinion!

Mitch Dworkin
http://www.securinga...

http://www.securinga...
Listen to Gen. Wes Clark fight for Dems on Sean Hannity's radio program:

An excellent example for all of us to follow and what we all need to be doing to help fight against extreme right wing Neocon smear propaganda which will help our local candidates to win their races!

http://securingameri...
Gen. Wes Clark's endorsement of Jim Webb against George Allen

http://www.webbforse...

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http://transcripts.c...

THE SITUATION ROOM

Aired September 6, 2006 - 19:00 ET

BLITZER: There are surprising results in a new CNN poll about Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks. Our senior political analyst Bill Schneider is joining us with this story. Bill, how many Americans actually believe that Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader, was directly connected to 9/11 almost five years ago?

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Forty-three percent, Wolf. And that belief is surprisingly resilient. The numbers fell pretty steady for the past two years, but it's not really partisan. Republicans don't differ very much from Democrats. The belief is powerfully related to education.

A majority of high school educated Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. That number drops to 39 percent of those who attended college, 26 percent of college graduates, and only 19 percent of those who went to graduate school. The better educated you and presumably the better informed you are, the less likely you are to think that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.

BLITZER: Any other interesting results we're getting in this poll?

SCHNEIDER: Well, President Bush is making an effort to link the unpopular war in Iraq with the widely-supported war on terror. But most Americans consider the war in Iraq a separate military action. Interestingly, Wolf, women are more likely to see Iraq as part of the war on terror, but it's not helping President Bush. Women are more critical of the war in Iraq and therefore, more dissatisfied with the war on terror -- Wolf.

BLITZER: Bill Schneider reporting for us. Bill, thank you very much, interesting numbers. And this note: Despite numerous, very thorough investigations, including one by the 9/11 Commission, no evidence has been found directly linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, even indirectly linking the former Iraqi dictator to 9/11.

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http://www.washingto...

Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
The Associated Press
Monday, August 7, 2006; 6:24 AM

-- Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents _ up from 36 percent last year _ said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

"This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence," Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

"I think the Harris Poll was measuring people's surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country," said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra's announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press "didn't give the story the play it deserved." But in some quarters it was headlined.

"Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today ..." was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. "Americans are waking up from a distorted reality," read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general's book _ at best uncorroborated hearsay _ claimed "56 flights" by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that's more sustained than the odd headline.

"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."

Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.

The facts are that Iraq _ after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections _ acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity."

"Which isn't true," observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But "it doesn't surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible." This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she said.

Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull's WorldPublicOpinion.org found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD "finds," and people "assume the issue is still in play," Kull said.

"For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan." The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.

"As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with," said the Harris Poll's David Krane.

Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at "the best factual account," his group's densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.

"It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one representation to another," he said in an e-mail. "It would be a shame if one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed set of facts."

The creative "morphing" goes on.

As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.

"ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS?" asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.

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