Almost 70 percent of the American people believe -- incorrectly -- that Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks of Sept. 11.

Now where would they get an idea like that?

Not from me, says President Bush. "We've had no evidence that Saddam was involved with the September 11th [attacks]," he said Wednesday.

Not from me, says National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "We have never claimed that Saddam had either direction or control of 9-11," she said Tuesday.

Not from me, says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "I've not seen any evidence that would lead me to believe I could say that," he told reporters.

The outbreak of candor among Bush and his top aides was made necessary by statements from Vice President Dick Cheney in a Sept. 14 appearance on "Meet the Press." Cheney went seriously off-script in that interview, suggesting not only that Saddam might have been behind the attacks of Sept. 11, but also implying that Saddam sponsored the original attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

Until that point, Bush officials had walked a careful line, not quite claiming that Saddam was connected to Sept. 11, but never quite acknowledging that he wasn't. But once Cheney uttered those words on national television, the game was up. Bush officials knew they would be forced either to embrace or repudiate the vice president's statement.

Given the evidence, they chose to repudiate it.

Cheney's remarks on "Meet the Press" deserve further scrutiny, however, particularly his attempt to link Saddam to the first attack on the World Trade Center, which killed six people. Once that claim is placed in context, it helps to illuminate the internal process by which the Bush administration decided to take this nation to war.

The charge of Saddam's involvement in the '93 bombing was originated by Laurie Mylroie, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Mylroie holds a doctorate in political science from Harvard and has also taught at Harvard and the U.S. Naval War College.

After the '93 bombing, ABC News and Newsweek hired Mylroie as a consultant to help investigate the case. Over time, she came to believe that the FBI, federal prosecutors and other authorities had actually overlooked the real significance of the bombing.

According to the official explanation, the bombing was the work of a terror cell of Palestinian and Egyptian radicals, most of whom were convicted by a federal jury. They were led by Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani, who was sentenced to 240 years in prison.

But according to Mylroie, the man known as Yousef was actually a secret Iraqi agent who was sent to New York by Saddam to exact revenge after the Gulf War.

Mylroie believes that the real Yousef happened to be in Kuwait when Saddam invaded that country in 1990, and that Yousef could have been killed. Iraqi intelligence might then have doctored Kuwaiti government files, right down to inserting false fingerprints. Their agent then could have assumed Yousef's identity and eventually made his way to New York.

When you read Mylroie's work, though, you quickly realize that her theory amounts to a very slender chain in which "might have" is connected to "could have," which leads in turn to "if so . . ." followed by a "therefore . . ." If you've ever cracked a book promising the real truth about the JFK assassination, you know the style of argument.

Mylroie's explanation has found no support in the intelligence community, and in 2001, her credibility was strained further when she publicly suggested that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing, might have been dupes acting at Saddam's behest. She also alleged that evidence of such a connection to Saddam had been suppressed for political reasons by President Clinton.

A right-wing McKinney

Given that record, it was no surprise that in the wake of Sept. 11, Mylroie quickly pointed to Saddam as the instigator of the attacks. A few weeks later, when anthrax was mailed to news media and prominent politicians, she suggested that Saddam was behind that attack as well, contradicting CIA and FBI analysis that the source was probably domestic.

It would be tempting, then, to dismiss Mylroie as a right-wing version of Cynthia McKinney, who infamously suggested based on no evidence whatsoever that Bush had allowed the attacks of Sept. 11 to occur to enrich his friends and family with defense contracts.

To do so, however, would be a disservice to Mylroie's influence.

In 2000, the American Enterprise Institute's publishing arm put out a book by Mylroie, "A Study in Revenge," in which she laid out her case for Saddam's role in the 1993 World Trade Center attack. At the time, Cheney was on AEI's board.

After Sept. 11, the book was reissued by HarperCollins as "The War Against America." The cover of the reissued book contains a prominent endorsement: "Provocative and disturbing . . . argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing . . . was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence."

The blurb's author is Paul Wolfo-witz, deputy defense secretary and, along with Cheney, a strong advocate of war with Iraq.

In her author's acknowledgment, Mylroie thanks Wolfowitz for being "kind enough to listen to this work presented orally and later to read the manuscript. At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She also thanks Wolfowitz's wife, Clare, who "fundamentally shaped this book, infusing it with her wisdom, prudence and very considerable talent for expression."

Mylroie further acknowledges the assistance of John Bolton, now the controversial undersecretary of state for arms control, and notes her extreme gratitude to "Lewis (Scooter) Libby for his timely and generous assistance." Libby is now Cheney's chief of staff.

Woolsey lends his backing

On the book's back cover, Richard Perle, former chairman and now member of the Defense Policy Board, suggests that "this splendid and wholly convincing book should form the basis for urgent Senate and House hearings."

The foreword to the reissued book is written by R. James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA and also a member of the Defense Policy Board. In that foreword, written in the wake of Sept. 11, Woolsey acknowledges that the evidence in those attacks points clearly to Osama bin Laden as the chief organizer.

But to Woolsey, that overwhelming evidence may actually point to Iraq's involvement. "Precisely because a trail has been left that points so obviously to bin Laden, the nagging question for those of suspicious minds is whether there may have been a senior partner hiding in the shadows," Woolsey writes, suggesting Saddam in that role.

Such statements help to explain why so many prominent members of the Bush administration rushed to the conclusion that Saddam was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Several accounts of the aftermath of the attacks, including Bob Woodward's "Bush at War," report that Wolfowitz immediately identified Iraq as a possible sponsor of the attack. At his urging, Rumsfeld that day ordered an investigation into possible Iraqi ties. Woolsey was dispatched twice to Britain, along with a team from the Defense and Justice departments, unsuccessfully seeking evidence to confirm Mylroie's far-fetched theory and thus justify war.

At the same time, CIA analysts were likewise failing to confirm alleged ties between al-Qaida and Saddam. On multiple occasions in the days leading up to war, Cheney and Libby traveled to CIA headquarters for unusual meetings that agency analysts interpreted as efforts to pressure them into changing their conclusions. The two men "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here," an unidentified senior CIA official told the Washington Post in June.

At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were equally frustrated by the lack of evidence to confirm Mylroie's theory. Analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency were instructed to study Mylroie's book, which they had already concluded was groundless. Nonetheless, "the message was, why can't we prove this is right?" a DIA official told the Post.

War momentum builds

Eventually, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz even created a special office within the Pentagon specifically to "reconsider" the evidence compiled by other agencies. Given Rumsfeld's statement this week, that effort also came up dry.

(Mylroie covers this process herself in her latest book, "Bush vs. The Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror.")

Unfortunately, while the intelligence community was trying to find evidence of a link that did not exist, the momentum for war with Iraq had become overwhelming. Untested preconceptions, in other words, quickly drove national policy, and by the time the facts caught up with them, it was too late.

How could that be allowed to happen?

Woolsey, a longtime Washington hand, offers an inadvertent clue in his foreword to the Mylroie book. What follows is Woolsey's rationale for how the Clinton administration overlooked supposed evidence of Saddam's involvement in the '93 bombing:

"Readers can determine for themselves whether the blinkers that narrowed the field of vision of the Clinton administration . . . were created solely by an objective analysis of the facts as the administration knew them at the time, or were the result of something else," Woolsey wrote. "The Clinton White House had a propensity to start with the impression it wanted to create and then work backward to the policy it followed and even the facts it sought."

Those words now drip with unintended irony.