Fox News History: Bolling Claims Saddam Hussein "Financed" 9/11 Attacks

BEN DIMIERO/Media Matters For America:

The Five co-host Eric Bolling apparently thinks that the United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein "financed" the 9/11 terror attacks. This is blatantly false. The link between Hussein and September 11 has been long-since debunked by numerous investigative bodies, including the 9/11 Commission, which discovered "no credible evidence" that Iraq was involved in the attacks. 

In a January 11 post on Twitter, Bolling linked to a Huffington Post article highlighting comments he made on The Five on January 9, in which he accused children's book publisher Scholastic of "pushing a liberal agenda." According to Bolling, liberal bias can be found in children's history textbooks that include "very liberally biased" arguments such as: "George Bush went in [Iraq] because he heard there were weapons of mass destruction and they were never found."

Responding to the Huffington Post, Bolling wrote: "We (America) 'went into' Iraq because radical Islamists killed 3k of ours+Saddam financed."

In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration repeatedly suggested (in the absence of credible evidence) close links between Iraq and al Qaeda. A poll taken less than six months after the invasion found that nearly 70% of Americans wrongly believed that Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks.

Bolling's assertion that Hussein "financed" 9/11 has been thoroughly debunked. As reported by The Washington Post in 2004, the 9/11 Commission explained that there was '"no credible evidence' that Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq collaborated with the al Qaeda terrorist network on any attacks on the United States.'" 

Further, in 2007, the US Defense Department released a report concluding that "Saddam Hussein's government did not cooperate with al Qaeda prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq." 

But if Bolling wants to dismiss the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission as "liberally biased," then perhaps he would listen to Dick Cheney, who also conceded in a 2009 speech that, "I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true."