Getting back to the democratic fundamental mecanisms is needed.

The president and his administration cant be said to be at fault.
The president could have been blamed in two cases:

-he linked iraq to 9/11 in an absolute manner, leaving himself and the democratic us no withdrawal option.

-he didnt seize the opportunity of associating iraq's behaviour to the terrorist factions who stroke iraq, missing an opportunity to increase the amount of private property to secure the democratic rights.

The president did not commit either mistakes hence the quality of his democratic job, the satisfaction of his people and his reelection.

The president (and his administration with personalities like collin powells whose only use has been to use his credit to give authority to the democratic us version) acted to merge iraq and al qaeda up to 99,9 %, allowing them again to display a comfortable attitude when they said that they had convictions, even very strong convictions but that they were wrong and that's why democracy is so great because leaders can recognize they had wrong prejudices after taking a course of course of actions at no cost and the usual blabla about democracy.

But even if the president said 'I'm one hundred per cent sure that iraq and al qaeda plotted together 9/11', indeed a very bad democratic move, this could have not cleaned the us democratic people from their self proclaimed attitudes.

Nothing in democracy tells them to take one of their leaders' word. On the contrary, they maintain certain social decisions on the behalf of distrust of their leaders.
The us democratic us have a large and easy access to information. It is easy to bypass the official information channels to seek a personal version.
Now considering the importance of the issue and the obvious communauty of interests existing between the administration and corporations they are in deep contact with, the bell should have been rung if something was felt as an alert.
One could conceive that in such case and considering the fare of world travel, they could have gone to investigate personally in the concerned world area for say 1 per cent of what they earn per year.
But since nothing was going wrong democratically, they reacted accordingly.

That's all part of a now well identified feature of democracy called the democratic masquerade.

Of course the use of datas like the former sharereactor forum could for sure shed light of who say what in those times but it is also well known that democratic people need here and then a new virginity to maintain a shallow consistency.