The big news of the week has been the response to the Knight-Ridder Poll asking this question:
As far as you know, how many of the September 11th terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens: most of them, some of them, just one, or none?"
Most of them 21% Most of them.. 21 Some of them ..23 Just one........6 None...........17 Don't know.....33
Many remarks have been made about how stupid people are, or at least how poorly the news media conveys important data to the public (and I won't argue with that second point at all), but I do find it downright scary that people can get angry enough to support war without having cared enough to notice the national origins of the hijackers. Surely it's not a secret that most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, rather than Iraq? Yet more people thought "most of them" were from Iraq than actually got the right answer to this question."
Obviously, a lot of that is thanks to the White House having worked so hard to misinform the public and tie 9/11 to Iraq, but if the Clinton administration had tried to pass off such lies as fact, you know the press would have been all over it, and they certainly would have called him a liar outright. (Hell, even the fact that Gore was telling the truth didn't protect him from being called a liar.) But Bush and his pals just skate through with stuff like this because the press just doesn't seem to care. Folks, we're talking about killing people, for dog's sake - doesn't this stuff count on your "moral clarity" scale?
Still, bottom line: Ordinary people should bother to notice. Yes, the press at this point should be spelling out that none of the hijackers were Iraqi, but a year ago their actual nationalities were all over the media and now only 17% remember that?
It's no surprise that the farther from the truth respondents were, the more likely they were to support Bush. But that doesn't tell you whether you have to be stupid to support Bush or whether it's just the same stupid people who always seem to support "the president" no matter who it is. In this media milieu it's never easy to know what's really going on, but in matters of life and death it would be nice to know that people at least care enough to try, and you really don't have to try very hard to know how many Iraqis were among the hijackers. (Well, at least the official story, anyway.)
