ABSTRACT
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by international terrorists. Almost immediately thereafter, US President George W. Bush declared a global ‘war on terror’ with Osama Bin Laden as its central target. Despite overwhelming evidence that the attacks had been solely orchestrated by Bin Laden’s al Qaeda network (including its claim of responsibility), the Bush administration also sought to link 9/11 to Iraq, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party (Scheer 2003). More speci¿cally, the Bush administration initiated an 18-month propaganda campaign to convince the US public and the world that Iraq 1) was involved in the attacks of 9/11, 2) possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and 3) represented a grave and growing threat to US security (Scheer 2003). In fact, Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld, began to link Iraq to 9/11 within 48 hours following the terrorist attacks (Clarke 2004). By the fall of 2002, President Bush was proclaiming that ‘the Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons’ (Scheer 2003: 1). The Bush administration’s propaganda campaign convinced the majority of US citizens that Iraq was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11 by the time the US-led invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003 (Corn 2003).
