It's on record with more than one witness that Bush demanded his staff seek a link to tie Saddam to 9-11, startiong on 9-12.
Here's another tidbit: "When interviewed by Tim Russert, Vice President Cheney asserted that Iraq was "the heart of the base" for the 9/11 terrorists and went on from there with a series of half-truths and outright deceptions about almost every topic broached, including his supposed lack of current "financial interest in Halliburton ." Mr. Cheney, a master of the above-reproach dead pan, just kept going, effortlessly mowing right through any objections by the host. The vice president was banking, as Dr. Dean did on "This Week," on a cultural environment in which fiction and nonfiction have become so scrambled and can be so easily manipulated by politicians and show-biz impresarios alike that credibility itself has become a devalued, if not archaic, news value. This is why the big national mystery of the moment why do almost 70 percent of Americans believe in Mr. Cheney's fictional insinuation that Saddam Hussein had some hand in 9/11? is not so hard to crack. As low as the administration's credibility may be, it is still trusted more than the media trying to correct the fictions the White House plants in the national consciousness." --Frank Rich, NMYT, 09.28.03