GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Is there a Bin Laden Sadaam link?

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/...ink/index.html

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Bottom line: U.S. officials claim there is evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection -- but there is no "smoking gun."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said he thinks the TV networks' news coverage has helped sell the Saddam-al Qaeda connection. "Suddenly, it was Osama, Osama, Osama ... Saddam, Saddam, Saddam ... and the networks -- the broadcast media -- simply picked that up [and] transferred our feelings of alarm and anger from one villain to another."

In a February CNN-Time poll, 76 percent of those surveyed felt Saddam provides assistance to al Qaeda. Another poll released in February asked, "Was Saddam Hussein personally involved in the September 11 attacks?" Although it is a claim the Bush administration has never made and for which there is no evidence, 72 percent said it was either very or somewhat likely.

CIA Director George Tenet
"I think the administration has used the media very successfully to make the case against Saddam as the chief evildoer of the moment, but I still think there's an awful lot of uneasiness in America over this war," said Howard Kurtz, Washington Post media critic and co-host of CNN's "Reliable Sources."

Some critics blame the cable news networks for helping make Iraq the new enemy. "They use essentially the kind of logos, martial music, and so on that we saw after Gulf War One had started," Krugman said. "So, from the point of view of the American public, Iraq is already the enemy; we're already at war."

Many Americans who watch U.S. news coverage have accepted Saddam as the new enemy. Europeans have a different outlook.

"The European media, by contrast, have been very skeptical of the war, very aggressive of covering the anti-war movement," explained Kurtz, "and some people think they have a strain of anti-Americanism -- or at least anti-George Bush."