For example, in a CBS News Special Report on September 11, the day of the attacks, Dan Rather spoke with Middle East expert Fouad Ajami about this possibility. [In all the following quotes, emphases are added.] Rather said to Ajami:

And the talk that Saddam Hussein-he celebrated today, called it a great day, the greatest day of the century or some such thing... Should it be determined-should it be determined that Saddam Hussein helped in any way with this?

Ajami responded that

this administration has sworn-I mean, there is-the wing of the administration which actually believes in roll-back in-in Iraq, not in containment. They believe that the containment of Saddam was a mistake, and they believe that they should now actually finish the job that they didn't do a decade ago. So there will be pressure on them if indeed it's Saddam, if indeed it's Saddam, triggered by the fact that they've been talking about unseating Saddam Hussein and trying him for crimes of war. Then again, the same logic: We will have to go to the source. Either we go to the source in Afghanistan, if it's the-if it's bin Laden and the Taliban, or we will have to go to the source in Baghdad, if it's indeed Saddam Hussein who got himself involved in this.

The next day, in an ABC News Special Report, anchorman Peter Jennings talked to former CIA director James Woolsey, pointing the finger at Saddam and Iraq more directly:

But you have mentioned in this conversation alone three times, and I think you mentioned it yesterday, Iraq. Why do you keep-why do you keep bringing up Iraq?

Woolsey responded:

Because I think there has started to be rethinking of the World Trade Center operation of 1993, mainly under the influence of a fascinating new book by Laurie Mylroie called "Saddam's Study of Revenge." It suggests that the government may have been involved in the World Trade Center bombing of... 1993. If that's true, Ramsey Yusef, now in prison in Colorado, was involved with the Iraqi government, perhaps as an agent, and that means they were also involved with the plan he had to destroy twelve American airliners in the Pacific, the plan that went awry when he was caught and-and arrested. I think a relook at those older cases, a fresh look, a look that was not taken in the last six years-six or seven years of the Clinton administration, is very much in-in line now, and-and if it bears out the way Lori and Jim Fox, the FBI agent I mentioned before... suggested, it may turn out that Saddam made a second and this time successful try at what he failed to bring off in 1993.

And on the NBC Today show, on September 14, the chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, who was presented as "following all of the developments on the search for those responsible," reported:

This is intensive activity. They [the State Department] need to know-they need to know where bin Laden is, so they have to get better support from the region... Bin Laden has left the locations where we thought that he was, but he is somewhere in that country. And the ultimate goal is not to just go after bin Laden, but also to go after other terror groups that are related to him. There's even talk of an attack against Saddam Hussein. So this is a much bigger campaign than the kind of pin prick campaign we saw in the attacks in August of 1998 after the embassy bombings during the Clinton administration. What George Bush and Dick Cheney have decided to do in the last couple of days with Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld and the intelligence support that they get is take this opportunity of a devastation, of the horror of what has happened to the United States as the first real opening to have public support, 80 percent in the polls, for a dedicated long-term multiyear campaign against global terror. So it's not just bin Laden, but he is certainly [a/the] key figure involved in crossing over the barriers of many of these groups.

From the very first, then, while the effect of the attacks was not yet fully grasped, Saddam Hussein's name was already on many lips. Consistent with the press reports and the likely predispositions of the public, belief in the Iraqi leader's involvement was already widespread.

In the very first poll following the attack, a Time/CNN/Harris Interactive survey of September 13, 2001, focused specifically on Saddam Hussein, asking "How likely is it that Saddam Hussein is personally involved in Tuesday's terrorist attacks (on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon September 11, 2001)-would you say that it is very likely, somewhat likely, or not at all likely?" Though an almost complete lack of evidence at this point should have led most respondents to say "not likely" or "not sure," a large majority-fully 78 percent-responded that they thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks (34 percent very likely, 44 percent somewhat likely). In other words, the public already believed that Saddam was not just involved with al-Qaeda, but that he was directly involved in the attacks. Americans, then, were ready from the beginning to blame Saddam.

Thus, the Bush administration was not largely responsible for the public's initial misperception. At the same time, however, it did not make any effort to make clear what it actually knew about the possibility of an al-Qaeda connection to Iraq and the existence of Iraq's WMDs, or to correct the misperceptions of its supporters. And when the evidence-or the absence of it-continued to contradict these beliefs, the public began to reevaluate its perceptions along distinctly partisan lines.