In his book, Frank Rich asks, did the United States have bad intelligence going into the War in Iraq?
He responds: Well, yes and no. ... We did have some bad intelligence, notoriously bad intelligence, and as the administration often says, that same intelligence was seen by their political opposition, the Democrats. It was seen by Europeans. But, we also had good intelligence. We had intelligence that was correct. It was a mixture. And whether it's an amazing coincidence or not, somehow the bad intelligence was used consistently to sell the war—and the good intelligence we've only found out about in the past year or two as the war has come undone. That good intelligence was kept secret or repressed. ...
Oprah: So you say in the book that the biggest misconception is that a lot of Americans at the time believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.
Frank: Right. But it's interesting. Right after 9/11 polls showed very few Americans thought Saddam Hussein had anything to do with it. They thought it was about Osama bin Laden, which it was, and al-Qaeda. But by constantly mentioning 9/11 and Iraq in the same breath, in the same sentence, in the run up to war, it's almost like a mind melding...It creates this link. And so polls showed in that period more and more people started to believe there was a connection—to the point where when we went to war half of America thought the hijackers of 9/11 were Iraqis. None of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis.
