Bush 'clears'Saddam of 9/11
2003-09-18 07:13
Washington - President George W Bush said on Wednesday there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 - disputing an impression that critics say the administration tried to foster to justify the war against Iraq.
"There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties," the president said. But he also said, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."
The president's comment was the administration's firmest assertion that there is no proven link between Saddam and September 11. It came after Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday clouded the issue by saying, "It's not surprising people make that connection" between Saddam and the attacks.
Cheney, on NBC's Meet the Press, also repeated an allegation - doubted by many in the intelligence community - that Mohamed Atta, the main September 11 attacker, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague five months before September 11.
"We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it," Cheney said on Sunday. However, other US authorities have said information gathered on Atta's movement show he was on the US East Coast when that meeting supposedly took place.
Exaggerating links
Critics of the Bush administration have pointed to statements like Cheney's as evidence that the administration was exaggerating al-Qaeda's pre-war links with Saddam to help justify the US-led war against Iraq.
A recent poll indicated that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday, "I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that."
The administration has argued that Saddam's government had close links to al-Qaeda, the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden that masterminded the September 11 attacks.
US under assault
On Sunday, for example, Cheney said that success in stabilising and democratising Iraq would strike a major blow at the "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9-11."
Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda chiefs were in fact based in Afghanistan until the United States invaded that country in late 2001 and toppled the Taliban government that gave them refuge.
Bush himself has taken to referring to Iraq as the central front in the war against terror.
And on Tuesday, in an interview on ABC's Nightline, White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said that one of the reasons Bush went to war against Saddam was because he posed a threat in "a region from which the 9-11 threat emerged."
Cheney on Sunday was asked whether he was surprised that more than two-thirds of Americans in a Washington Post poll would express a belief that Iraq was behind the attacks.
"No, I think it's not surprising that people make that connection," he replied.
'We never claimed that'
Rice, asked about the same poll numbers, said, "We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein had either direction or control of 9-11."
Bush said there was no attempt by the administration to try to confuse people about any link between Saddam and September 11.
"No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," Bush said. "What the vice president said was is that he (Saddam) has been involved with al-Qaeda.
"And al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a US diplomat. There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties."
Most of the administration's public assertions have focused on the man Bush mentioned, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior bin Laden associate who officials have accused of trying to train terrorists in the use of poison for possible attacks in Europe, running a terrorist haven in northern Iraq - an area outside Saddam's control before the war - and organising an attack that killed an American aid executive in Jordan last year.
- AP