9/11 Commission says there are no credible links between 9/11 terrorists and
Iraq. Bush scrambled damage control and agreed that there were no links, but
there were attempts by Bin Laden to get help from Iraq, which were never
answered!
Still no WMD!!!!!

Bye Bye Bushy!!! The Bush loss will be VERY humiliating since Kerry has little
weight. Americans will vote AGAINST Bush above all else.

RB

Interrogatory
NRO's Q&A

The Terror Ties That Bind Us to War
Osama and Saddam - two peas in a terror pod?
June 02, 2004
http://www.nationalreview.com/interr...0406020847.asp


Stephen F. Hayes, a staff writer for The Weekly Standard and former NRO
contributor, is author of the new book The Connection: How al Qaeda's
Cooperation with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. On publication
day, Tueday, he e-mailed with NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez about his book
and the evidence linking the former Iraq regime and al Qaeda.

NRO:

Your new book is on connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
Isn't that all a neocon myth? Isn't bin Laden on record dissing Saddam?
Secular Saddam, meanwhile, was no Islamic fundamentalist or extremist?
Did anti-American hatred trump all?

Stephen F. Hayes:

If the Iraq-al Qaeda connection is a neocon myth, those neocons are
even more resourceful than the conspiracy theorists suggest and they
sure have got a lot of unlikely people making their arguments. Evan
Bayh, Democrat from Indiana, has described the Iraq-al Qaeda connection
as a relationship of "mutual exploitation." Joe Lieberman said, "There
are extensive contacts between Saddam Hussein's government and al
Qaeda." George Tenet, too, has spoken of those contacts and goes
further, claiming Iraqi "training" of al Qaeda terrorists on WMDs and
provision of "safe haven" for al Qaeda in Baghdad. Richard Clarke once
said the U.S. government was "sure" Iraq had provided a chemical-
weapons precursor to an al Qaeda-linked pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
Even Hillary Clinton cited the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as one reason
she voted for the Iraq War. Saddam was, for a time, an avowed
secularist. He began to use Islamist language during the Iran-Iraq War
(1980-1988) and stepped it up during the first Gulf War. By the mid-
1990s, when his son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected (and was later killed
when he foolishly returned to Iraq), Saddam was interrupting Baath-
party meetings for prayers. Bin Laden has dissed Saddam several times.
And I would certainly never argue that they were buddies. It was an on-
again, off-again relationship based, as Bayh says, on mutual
exploitation and a common enemy.

NRO:

Who is Ahmed Hikmat Shakir?

Hayes:

Shakir is one of the most intriguing and puzzling potential links
between Iraq and al Qaeda. He was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda
meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where U.S. intelligence officials
believe the planning for the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole and September
11 took place. Shakir was working, ostensibly, for Malaysian Airlines
as a VIP greeter. He told associates that he got the job through a
contact at the Iraqi embassy and the same contact determined his
schedule. Shakir escorted one of the 9/11 hijackers (Khalid al Mihdhar)
to the meeting and left his airport "job" days after the meeting broke
up. Making things even more interesting, Defense Department
investigators recently found Shakir's name - with a slight spelling
discrepancy - on three separate lists of Saddam Fedayeen officers. He
was captured twice after September 11 - once in Qatar, once in Jordan -
and let go. The Iraqi government reportedly showed a keen interest in
his release. What was he doing at the meeting? How did he know the
hijackers? And what, exactly, was his relationship to the Iraqi regime?
He may have been a bit player, but it sure would be nice to know more.
I hope the 9/11 Commission includes a discussion of Shakir in its final
report.

NRO:

What is the Feith memo and how important is it?

Hayes:

The Feith Memo is a report that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith
sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee last fall, in response to a
request by that panel to see information the Pentagon gathered on Iraq-
al Qaeda connections. Analysts in the DoD policy shop pored over old
intelligence, gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies, and unearthed
some interesting nuggets - some of them from raw intelligence reports
and others from finished intelligence products. CIA Director George
Tenet was asked about the Feith Memo at a Senate hearing in March and
distanced his agency from the Pentagon analysis. He submitted another
version of the document to the committee with some "corrections" to the
Pentagon submission. My understanding is that there were but a few such
adjustments and that they were relatively minor (although my book
challenges two of the most interesting reports in the memo). Some of
the stuff - telephone intercepts, foreign-government reporting,
detainee debriefings, etc. - is pretty straightforward and most of the
report tracks with what Tenet has said publicly; it just provides more
detail. That said, there were two items that seemed to require more
explanation and, when weighed against available evidence, seem
questionable.

NRO:

Mike Isikoff from Newsweek and others have tried to discredit some of
your reporting on these connections. Do you concede any of their
points?

Hayes:

Well, Isikoff is a very good investigative reporter and I have long
respected his work. We simply disagree on much of this. Intelligence
reporting is quite subjective, of course, and lends itself to various
interpretations. My problem with so much of the media reporting on this
issue is that most journalists have chosen not to investigate the
connection, and seem too eager to dismiss them. Why? This wasn't the
case in the late 1990s, when Iraq-al Qaeda connections were more widely
reported in the establishment press. After I first wrote about the
Feith Memo, the Pentagon put out a statement designed to distance
itself from any alleged leak of classified intelligence. It was a
classic non-denial denial - virtually devoid of content. It was
something any veteran Washington reporter would dismiss without a
second thought. But reporters at the New York Times and Washington
Post, typically quite cynical about anything that comes from the
Pentagon's public- affairs shop, suddenly found it a remarkably
credible source.

NRO:

It's been suggested by Isikoff and others that some of the evidence
turns up nowadays is forged, that you can't take it on its face value.
To what extent is the evidence you present corroborated by other
evidence, other documented meetings, etc?

Hayes:

I think they're right on that point - and it's almost never a good idea
to take these things at face value. There was a report that surfaced in
December 2003 that suggested that Mohammed Atta had been in Baghdad
during the summer of 2001. And, a little too conveniently, the very
same document claimed that the U.S. was seeking uranium from Niger.
There's little question that the three-page report was forged. (An
interesting side note: That document came not from Ahmed Chalabi, but
from CIA favorite Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi interim prime minister.
Allawi has long argued that there was a significant relationship
between Saddam's Mukhabarat and al Qaeda.) Much of the evidence in the
book comes from open sources - media reporting, court documents,
interviews, etc. With respect to the information from the Feith Memo,
many of the bullet points corroborate one another or previous
intelligence on the relationship. For instance, the U.S. intelligence
community has long believed that bin Laden met with the deputy director
of Iraqi intelligence, Faruq Hijazi, in the mid-1990s. When we captured
Hijazi, we asked him about the meeting. Bin Laden, he reported, asked
for anti-ship limpet mines and training camps in Iraq.

NRO:

Did Mohammed Atta meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague -
multiple times?

Hayes:

I wish we knew. Atta was in Prague under very strange circumstances in
May 2000. What's unclear is whether he returned, as initially reported,
in April 2001. If he did, it wasn't under his own name. But news
reports claiming that the meeting couldn't have taken place because
U.S. intelligence has documentation placing him in the U.S. are not
accurate. One of the things I report in the book is that both George
Tenet and Condoleezza Rice say privately that they believe the April
2001 meeting took place.

NRO:

What is the strongest evidence that Iraq was a collaborator in the
Sept. 11 attacks?

Hayes:

Probably the Shakir story, which is far from conclusive. But it seems
to me that the presence of a suspected Saddam Fedayeen officer at a key
9/11-planning meeting can't be dismissed. There have been additional
recent developments in the Atta story reported by Edward Jay Epstein.
If those turn out to be true, they would be significant. I'm trying,
but as yet have been unable to prove or disprove them.

NRO:

What's the deal with Richard Clarke? Why is he so adamant to defend
Iraq vis-à-vis al Qaeda?

Hayes:

I put that question to a top Bush-administration official not long ago.
This person said: "If Iraq was involved with al Qaeda, whether they
were involved with 9/11 or not, the whole counterterrorism policy of
the 1990s was a failure." And we all know who was responsible for the
counterterrorism policy of the 1990s. One thing that perplexes me about
Clarke was his expressed certainty that there was an Iraqi hand in al
Qaeda chemical weapons production in the Sudan in the late-1990s. (Top
Clinton advisers - several of them now working for John Kerry -
continue to believe that today.) And Clarke's current views (no
connection) certainly put him at odds with CIA Director George Tenet.

NRO:

How much of what is in The Connection are al Qaeda-Iraq connections the
Bush administration could/should be using publicly to connect the dots
for people?

Hayes:

I think they could be doing a lot more on this. On the one hand, I
understand why the Bush administration is reluctant. After all, the CIA
director says privately that he believes the Atta-Prague meeting
probably took place but the conventional wisdom today dismisses that
possibility. But I don't think the administration can get away with
simply avoiding the discussion. One thing the White House could do is
insist that the intelligence community put together a team to explore
the connections. The 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group has been looking
for WMDs for more than a year; there is no equivalent on Iraq-al Qaeda
connections.

NRO:

Without revealing sources, how did you become so intimate with some of
this evidence that you sat down to write a book on it? Did you make a
lot of the connections while in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Mideast
yourself or back here?

Hayes:

I started doing general reporting on the build-up to the Iraq War and
was surprised that this angle seemed to be getting so little attention
from the media. Several reporters did out standing work on the Iraq-al
Qaeda connection in 2002 - Jeffrey Goldberg, of The New Yorker and
David Rose of Vanity Fair, come immediately to mind. I took the
foundation they laid and just kept asking questions - and with each one
the story got more complicated and more interesting. Most of my
reporting took place in the States. I did do some reporting for the
book in Iraq and I wish I would have been able to spend more time there.

-----------------------------------------------

SADDAM AND OSAMA
New York Post Editorial
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/23190.htm

June 17, 2004 -- To hear much of the news reporting yesterday, you'd
think a national 9/11 Commission report had blown a giant hole in the
Bush administra tion's rationale for toppling Saddam Hussein.
The commission did no such thing.

But that didn't stop congressional Democrats - led by presumptive
presidential nominee John Kerry - from renewing their charges that the
administration "misled America" about Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama
bin Laden.

Again, that's not what the report says.

And even if it did, a Saddam-Osama alliance is not why America opened a
front in Iraq as part of the War on Terror.

The staff report, re leased as part of yes terday's final public
hearings, says there was no evident connection between Saddam Hussein
and the 9/11 attacks.

In fact, the Bush administration has never said there was.

The report also says the commission has "no credible evidence that Iraq
and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Again, the administration never said there was.

But the report does say that bin Laden actively sought to work with
Saddam, through contacts arranged by the Sudanese government.

Indeed, it says, "a senior Iraqi intelligence office reportedly made
three visits to Sudan, finally meeting bin Laden in 1994." Further, it
says, "contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden
returned to Afghanistan."

The report claims that those contacts "do not appear to have resulted
in a collaborative relationship." But that's far from a flat-out "no
ties exist."

And, again, the administration has alleged only that Saddam and al
Qaeda maintained contacts that were more than casual or
inconsequential, none of which is denied in the commission report.

In fact, as Stephen Hayes writes in The Weekly Standard, the
conventional wisdom in Washington long before George W. Bush took
office was that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were partners in
terrorism.

Two Clinton-administration stalwarts, Attorney General Janet Reno and
U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, brought an indictment against bin Laden
and a deputy, Mohammed Atef, in 1998 - charging that Saddam and
Osama "reached an understanding . . . that on particular projects,
specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work
cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Yes, those allegations were eventually dropped from the indictment.
These likely means they couldn't have been proven in a court of law
under federal rules of evidence - not necessarily that they were
baseless to begin with.

(This underscores the dangers of treating global terrorism in the age
of suitcase nukes as a legal - not a military - matter, as candidate
Kerry proposes.)

Meanwhile, back in 1999, ABC News reported that Saddam had offered bin
Laden asylum, citing their "long relationship" and a December 1998
meeting in Afghanistan between Osama and Iraqi intelligence chief Faruq
Hijazi.

That same year, the Congressional Research Service reported that if
Saddam Hussein "decide[s] to use terrorists to attack the continental
United States, [he] would likely turn to bin Laden's al Qaeda," which
was then recruiting "Iraqi chemical weapons experts."

Did everyone mislead America?

If, in fact, the nation was misled, the misleading began long before
George W. Bush entered the White House.

But what if substantive Osama-Saddam ties were for real? Just because
the Kean commission hasn't yet found any evidence does not mean it
doesn't exist.

As recently as Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said that Saddam "had
long-established ties with al Qaeda" - a statement his spokesman
reiterated again yesterday.

Further details can be found in Richard Miniter's vastly illuminating
column on the opposite page.

In other words, the Kean commission - whose blatantly partisan Bush-
bashing has been manifest from the get-go - is hardly the final word on
the subject.

But the commission report does offer a clear rejoinder to those like
Sen. Bob Graham - a possible Kerry vice presidential pick - who charge
that the war in Iraq somehow constituted a distraction from the War on
Terror.

Many seem to have forgotten that the first U.S. military action after
9/11 was to invade Afghanistan and destroy its Taliban government,
targeting bin Laden strongholds - and capturing many of his top aides -
in the process.

As a result, the report says, "al Qaeda's funding has decreased
significantly. The arrests or deaths of several important financial
facilitators have decreased the amount of money al Qaeda has raised and
increased the costs and difficulty or raising and moving that money."

Moreover, though the organization re mains dangerous, it today has "a
greatly weakened central organization."

Still, President Bush realized - as John Kerry, the Democrats and the
Kean commission clearly do not - that the war on terrorism is not just
about seeking revenge against the perpetrators of 9/11.

It's about neutralizing radical Islam's fundamental challenge to
Western civilization - fighting to win a war that was imposed on the
West by evil men in the service of a depraved ideology.

The path to victory is not clear, but the alternative is one, two, many
9/11's - each more horrific than its predecessor.

Why is that so hard to understand?

---------------------------------------------

WRONG AGAIN
By RICHARD MINITER
New York Post Op-Ed
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/op...ists/23192.htm

June 17, 2004 -- THE 9/11 Commission is in danger of going the way of
the Warren Commission - a blue-chip panel investigating a national
tragedy that foolishly ends up fueling controversy. And that's a shame.
Yesterday, the commission announced there was "no credible evidence"
linking Iraq and al Qaeda. In reality, there's a wealth of evidence.

And by disputing the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, the commissioners are
answering a question no one asked them. They were supposed to
investigate 9/11, not al Qaeda as a whole. In an election year, this
makes them look partisan.

The timing of the final report smells fishy, too: 500,000 copies are
due in book stores on July 26 - the very day the Democratic convention
begins in Boston. Again, not a credibility-enhancing move.

The 9/11 panel seems recklessly naive when it takes the word of the
intelligence community as gospel. A wise commissioner would remember
that everyone has an institutional interest, a bias. (E.g., for many in
the intelligence community, conceding that Iraq could have been one of
bin Laden's backers would be admitting that they were wrong for the
past decade and wrong to oppose the Iraq war.) And a neutral
commissioner would conclude that the jury is still out on Iraq-al
Qaeda, not stamp it "case closed."

Yesterday's report itself casts doubt on the intelligence sector's long-
held beliefs. Buried in it is an admission that bin Laden sought a
partnership with Iraq (among other nations), though it maintains the
relationship was never consummated. (How could they know?) This
explodes two cherished myths of America's intelligence analysts: that
secular dictators and Islamic terrorists would never team up and that
al Qaeda is a "loose, stateless network," not a "cut out" for evil
regimes. If the CIA's analysts were wrong about that, couldn't they
also be wrong about a Saddam-bin Laden link?

A wealth of evidence on the public record - from government reports and
congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers -
attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam.

* Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the
1993 World Trade Center bomb, fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently
discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show
that Iraq gave Yasin both a home and a salary.

* Bin Laden met eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security
Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and
with Saddam's external intelligence service, according to intelligence
made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, at the United Nations
Security Council on Feb. 6, 2003.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in
Khartoum, according to Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the
mid '90s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease
all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah
Suleiman, was arrested by Pakistani authorities. Suleiman was shuttling
between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf
Galan - who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved
with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks - that show
the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid.
The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre."

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu
Mohammed," told the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's
fighters in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in
Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the
training facility southeast of Baghdad, where militants trained to
hijack planes with knives - on a full-size Boeing 707.

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday,
defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that
there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

* The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who
claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with
Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at
the time.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden
associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations
there," Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their
Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men,
materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in
Afghanistan. Wounded, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May
2002. When he recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq.
Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of
Lawrence Foley, a U.S. Agency for International Development official.
The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from
Zarqawi's cell in Iraq.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center
show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror
group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a
London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to
train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior
network" in Baghdad.

* CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence
Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document-forgery
and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and
gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates
characterized the relationship as successful. . . . This information is
based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from
credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple
sources."

The 9/11 Commission's work is too important to squander on politics.
The nation needs a full, frank assessment of the government-wide
failures in the Clinton and Bush years that led to the terrorist
attacks - and a sober judge, not a camera-mugging prosecutor. Let's
hope the commissioners realize that before July 26.


Richard Miniter is the author of "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's
Failures Unleashed Global Terror."

-----------------------------------------------

Iraq & al Qaeda
The 9/11 Commission raises more questions than it answers.
by Andrew C. McCarthy
June 17, 2004
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccart...0406170840.asp

The 9/11 Commission's staff has come down decidedly on the side of the
naysayers about operational ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama
bin Laden's al Qaeda network. This development is already being met with
unbridled joy by opponents of the Iraq war, who have been carping for days
about recent statements by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney that reaffirmed the deposed Iraqi regime's promotion of terror.

The celebration is premature. The commission's cursory treatment of so
salient a national question as whether al Qaeda and Iraq confederated is
puzzling. Given that the panel had three hours for Richard Clarke, one
might have hoped for more than three minutes on Iraq. More to the point,
though, the staff statements released Wednesday - which seemed to be
contradicted by testimony at the public hearing within minutes of their
publication - raise more questions than they answer, about both matters the
staff chose to address and some it strangely opted to omit.

The staff's sweeping conclusion is found in its Statement No. 15 ("Overview
of the Enemy"), which states:

Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in
Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. Bin Laden had in
fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The
Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin
Laden to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al
Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to
Sudan, finally meeting Bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have
requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in
procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been
reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin
Laden returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a
collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly
denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible
evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the Uni

Just taken on its own terms, this paragraph is both internally inconsistent
and ambiguously worded. First, it cannot be true both that the Sudanese
arranged contacts between Iraq and bin Laden and that no "ties existed
between al Qaeda and Iraq." If the first proposition is so, then the "[t]wo
senior Bin Laden associates" who are the sources of the second are either
lying or misinformed.

In light of the number of elementary things the commission staff tells us
its investigation has been unable to clarify (for example, in the very next
sentence after the Iraq paragraph, the staff explains that the question
whether al Qaeda had any connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
or the 1995 plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky "remains a matter of
substantial uncertainty"), it is fair to conclude that these two senior bin
Laden associates may not be the most cooperative, reliable fellows in town
regarding what bin Laden was actually up to. Moreover, we know from press
reports and the administration's own statements about the many al Qaeda
operatives it has captured since 9/11 that the government is talking to
more than just two of bin Laden's top operatives. That begs the questions:
Have we really only asked two of them about Iraq? If not, what did the
other detainees say?

Inconvenient Facts

The staff's back-of-the-hand summary also strangely elides mention of
another significant matter - but one that did not escape the attention of
Commissioner Fred Fielding, who raised it with a panel of law-enforcement
witnesses right after noting the staff's conclusion that there was "no
credible evidence" of cooperation. It is the little-discussed original
indictment of bin Laden, obtained by the Justice Department in spring 1998
- several weeks before the embassy bombings and at a time when the
government thought it would be prudent to have charges filed in the event
an opportunity arose overseas to apprehend bin Laden. Paragraph 4 of that
very short indictment reads:

Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan
and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group
Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived
common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al
Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda
would not work against that government and that on particular projects,
specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work
cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.
(Emphasis added.) This allegation has always been inconvenient for the
"absolutely no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda" club. (Richard Clarke,
a charter member, handles the problem in his book by limiting the 1998
indictment to a fleeting mention and assiduously avoiding any description
of what the indictment actually says.)

It remains inconvenient. As testimony at the commission's public hearing
Wednesday revealed, the allegation in the 1998 indictment stems primarily
from information provided by the key accomplice witness at the embassy
bombing trial, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl. Al-Fadl told agents that when al Qaeda
was headquartered in the Sudan in the early-to-mid-1990s, he understood an
agreement to have been struck under which the jihadists would put aside
their antipathy for Saddam and explore ways of working together with Iraq,
particularly regarding weapons production.

On al Qaeda's end, al-Fadl understood the liaison for Iraq relations to be
an Iraqi named Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim (a.k.a. "Abu Hajer al Iraqi"), one of
bin Laden's closest friends. (There will be a bit more to say later about
Salim, who, it bears mention, was convicted in New York last year for
maiming a prison guard in an escape attempt while awaiting trial for
bombing the embassies.) After the embassies were destroyed, the
government's case, naturally, was radically altered to focus on the attacks
that killed over 250 people, and the Iraq allegation was not included in
the superseding indictment. But, as the hearing testimony made clear, the
government has never retracted the allegation.

Neither have other important assertions been retracted, including those by
CIA Director George Tenet. As journalist Stephen Hayes reiterated earlier
this month, Tenet, on October 7, 2002, wrote a letter to Congress, which
asserted:

Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving
and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we
have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank. We have
solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going
back a decade. Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have
discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression. Since Operation
Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al
Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have credible
reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them
acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has
provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and
making conventional bombs. Iraq's increasing support to extremist
Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda
suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U
Tenet, as Hayes elaborated, has never backed away from these assessments,
reaffirming them in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee as
recently as March 9, 2004.
Is the commission staff saying that the CIA director has provided faulty
information to Congress? That doesn't appear to be what it is saying at
all. This is clear - if anything in this regard can be said to be "clear" -
from the staff's murky but carefully phrased summation sentence, which is
worth parsing since it is already being gleefully misreported: "We have no
credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the
United States." (Italics mine.) That is, the staff is not saying al Qaeda
and Iraq did cooperate - far from it. The staff seems to be saying: "they
appear to have cooperated but we do not have sufficient evidence to
conclude that they worked in tandem on a specific terrorist attack, such as
9/11, the U.S.S. Cole bombing, or the embassy bombings."

Kabul...Baghdad...

The same might, of course, be said about the deposed Taliban government in
Afghanistan. Before anyone gets unhinged, I am not suggesting that bin
Laden's ties to Iraq were as extensive as his connections to Afghanistan.
But as is the case with Iraq, no one has yet tied the Taliban to a direct
attack on the United States, although no one doubts for a moment that
deposing the Taliban post-9/11 was absolutely the right thing to do.

I would point out, moreover, that al Qaeda is a full-time terrorist
organization - it does not have the same pretensions as, say, Sinn Fein or
Hamas, to be a part-time political party. Al Qaeda's time is fully devoted
to conducting terrorist attacks and planning terrorist attacks. Thus, if a
country cooperates with al Qaeda, it is cooperating in (or facilitating,
abetting, promoting - you choose the euphemism) terrorism. What difference
should it make that no one can find an actual bomb that was once in
Saddam's closet and ended up at the Cole's hull? If al Qaeda and Iraq were
cooperating, they had to be cooperating on terrorism, and as al Qaeda made
no secret that it existed for the narrow purpose of inflicting terrorism on
the United States, exactly what should we suppose Saddam was hoping to
achieve by cooperating with bin Laden?

Of course, we may yet find that Saddam was a participant in the specific
9/11 plot. In that regard, the commission staff's report is perplexing,
and, again, raises - or flat omits - many more questions than it resolves.

Don't Forget Shakir

For one thing, the staff has now addressed the crucial January 2000
Malaysia planning session in a few of its statements. As I have previously
recounted, this was the three-day meeting at which Khalid al Midhar and
Nawaf al Hazmi, eventual hijackers of Flight 77 (the one that hit the
Pentagon), met with other key 9/11 planners. The staff's latest report,
Statement Number 16 ("Outline of the 9/11 Plot"), even takes time to
describe how the conspirators were hosted in Kuala Lampur by members of a
Qaeda-affiliated terror group, Jemaah Islamiah. But the staff does not
mention, let alone explain, let alone explain away, that al Midhar was
escorted to the meeting by Ahmed Hikmat Shakir.

Shakir is the Iraqi who got his job as an airport greeter through the Iraqi
embassy, which controlled his work schedule. He is the man who left that
job right after the Malaysia meeting; who was found in Qatar six days after
9/11 with contact information for al Qaeda heavyweights - including bin
Laden's aforementioned friend, Salim - and who was later detained in Jordan
but released only after special pleading from Saddam's regime, and only
after intelligence agents concluded that he seemed to have sophisticated
counter-interrogation training. Shakir is also the Iraqi who now appears,
based on records seized since the regime's fall, to have been all along an
officer in Saddam's Fedayeen.

Does all this amount to proof of participation in the 9/11 plot? Well, in
any prosecutor's office it would be a pretty good start. And if the
commission staff was going to get into this area of Iraqi connections to al
Qaeda at all, what conceivable good reason is there for avoiding any
discussion whatsoever of Shakir? At least tell us why he is not worth
mentioning.

Prague Problem

One thing the staff evidently thought it was laying to rest was the other
niggling matter of whether 9/11 major domo Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi
intelligence officer Ahmed al-Ani in Prague in April 2001. The staff's
conclusion is that the meeting is a fiction. To say its reasoning is less
than satisfying would be a gross understatement. Here's the pertinent
conclusion, also found in Statement Number 16:

We have examined the allegation that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence
officer in Prague on April 9 [2001]. Based on the evidence available -
including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee
reporting - we do not believe that such a meeting occurred. The FBI's
investigation places him in Virginia as of April 4, as evidenced by this
bank surveillance camera shot of Atta withdrawing $8,000 from his account.
Atta was back in Florida by April 11, if not before. Indeed, investigation
has established that, on April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta's cellular telephone
was used numerous times to call Florida phone numbers from cell sites
within Florida. We have seen no evidence that Atta ventured overseas again
or re-entered the United States before July, when he traveled to Spain
under his true name and back under his true name.
This is ground, again, that I've recently covered. To rehearse: Czech
intelligence has alleged that Atta was seen in Prague on April 8 or 9,
2001. Atta had withdrawn $8,000 cash from a bank in Virginia on April 4 and
was not eyeballed again by a witness until one week later, on April 11. The
new detail added by the staff is that Atta's cell phone was used in Florida
on three days (April 6, 9 and 10) during that time frame. Does this tend to
show he was in Florida rather than Prague? It could, but not very
convincingly. Telling us Atta's cell phone was used is not the same as
telling us Atta used the cell phone.

Atta almost certainly would not have been able to use the cell phone
overseas, so it would have been foolish to tote it along to the Czech
Republic - especially if he was traveling clandestinely (as the large cash
withdrawal suggests). He would have left it behind. Atta, moreover, had a
roommate (and fellow hijacker), Marwan al-Shehhi. It is certainly possible
that Shehhi - whom the staff places in Florida during April 2001 - could
have used Atta's cell phone during that time.

Is it possible that Atta was in Florida rather than Prague? Of course it
is. But the known evidence militates strongly against that conclusion: an
eyewitness puts Atta in Prague, meeting with al-Ani; we know Atta was a
"Hamburg student" and represented himself as such in a visa application; it
has been reported that the Czechs have al-Ani's appointment calendar and it
says he was scheduled to meet on the critical day with a "Hamburg student";
and we know for certain that Atta was in Prague under very suspicious
circumstances twice in a matter of days (May 30 and June 2, 2000) during a
time the Czechs and Western intelligence services feared that Saddam,
through al-Ani, might be reviving a plot to use Islamic extremists to bomb
Radio Free Europe (a plot the State Department acknowledged in its annual
global terror report notwithstanding that the commission staff apparently
did not think the incident merited mention).

I am perfectly prepared to accept the staff's conclusion about Atta not
being in Prague - if the commission provides a convincing, thoughtful
explanation, which is going to have to get a whole lot better than a cell-
phone record.

What is the staff's reason for rejecting the eyewitness identification? Is
the "Hamburg student" entry bogus? Since the staff is purporting to provide
a comprehensive explanation of the 9/11 plot - the origins of which it
traces back to 1999 - what is their explanation for what Atta was doing in
Prague in 2000? Why, when the staff went into minute detail about the
travels of other hijackers (even when it conceded it did not know the
relevance of those trips), was Atta's trip to Prague not worthy of even a
passing mention? Why was it so important for Atta to be in Prague on May
30, 2000 that he couldn't delay for one day, until May 31, when his visa
would have been ready? Why was it so important for him to be in Prague on
May 30 that he opted to go despite the fact that, without a visa, he could
not leave the airport terminal? How did he happen to find the spot in the
terminal where surveillance cameras would not capture him for nearly six
hours? Why did he go back again on June 2? Was he meeting with al-Ani

Are these questions important to answer? You be the judge. According to the
9/11 Commission staff report, bin Laden originally pressed the operational
supervisor of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), "that the
attacks occur as early as mid-2000," even though bin Laden "recognized that
Atta and the other pilots had only just arrived in the United States to
begin their flight training[.]" Well I'll be darned: mid-2000 is exactly
when Atta made his two frenetic trips to Prague immediately before heading
to the United States to begin that flight training.

The commission staff next says, "[i]n 2001, Bin Laden apparently pressured
KSM twice more for an earlier date. According to KSM, Bin Laden first
requested a date of May 12, 2001," and then proposed a date in June or
July. Well, what do you know: all those dates are only weeks after Atta may
have had some reason to drop everything and secretly run to Prague for a
meeting with al-Ani.
Or maybe it's just a coincidence.


- Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the
1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven
others, is an NRO contributor.


-----------------------------------------------

IRAQ & AL QAEDA [Andy McCarthy]
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecor...ive.asp#034064

the exchange from the 9/11 hearing yesterday morning between Commissioner
Fred Fielding and Chicago U.S. Attorney Pat Fitzgerald (who indicted bin
Laden in 1998 as a Manhattan federal prosecutor), regarding the allegation
in the 1998 bin Laden indictment about an understanding between Iraq and al
Qaeda:


FIELDING: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

For the panel, I really have very specific questions about a specific
subject.

One of the hazy questions that surrounds Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida is
really its relationship, if any, with Iraq and with Saddam Hussein.

We've often heard that Osama bin Laden would not have been a natural ally,
for religious reasons, for the composition and nature of Saddam Hussein's
regime. And our staff report, as you just heard, basically says there's no
credible evidence of any cooperation between the two. However, there seems
to be some indicia that there may have been.

And, Mr. Fitzgerald, I'm delighted you're here, because this first question
really I wanted to ask specifically to you, because it relates to the
indictment of Osama bin Laden in the spring of 1998.

This is before the U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa and the
administration indicted Osama bin Laden. And the indictment, which was
unsealed a few months later, reads, "Al Qaida reached an understanding with
the government of Iraq that Al Qaida would not work against that
government, and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons
development, Al Qaida would work cooperatively with the government of
Iraq."

So my question to you is what evidence was that indictment based upon and
what was this understanding that's referenced in it?


FITZGERALD: And the question of relationship between Iraq and Al Qaida is
an interesting one. I don't have information post-2001 when I got involved
in a trial, and I don't have information post-September 11th. I can tell
you what led to that inclusion in that sealed indictment in May [1998] and
then when we superseded, which meant we broadened the charges in the Fall,
we dropped that language.

We understood there was a very, very intimate relationship between Al Qaida
and the Sudan. They worked hand in hand. We understood there was a working
relationship with Iran and Hezbollah, and they shared training. We also
understood that there had been antipathy between Al Qaida and Saddam
Hussein because Saddam Hussein was not viewed as being religious.

We did understand from people, including Al-Fadl -- and my recollection is
that he would have described this most likely in public at the trial that
we had, but I can't tell you that for sure; that was a few years ago --
that at a certain point they decided that they wouldn't work against each
other and that we believed a fellow in Al Qaida named [Mamdouh Mahmud
Salim, aka Abu Hajer al-Iraqi], tried to reach a, sort of, understanding
where they wouldn't work against each other. Sort of, "the enemy of my
enemy is my friend."

And that there were indications that within Sudan when Al Qaida was there -
- which Al Qaida left in the summer of '96 or spring '96 -- there were
efforts to work on joint -- you know, acquiring weapons.

Clearly, Al Qaida worked with the Sudan in getting those weapons in the
national defense force there and the intelligence service. There were
indications that Al-Fadl had heard from others that Iran was involved. And
they also had heard that Iraq was involved.

The clearest account from Al-Fadl as a Sudanese was that he had dealt
directly with the Sudanese intelligence service, so we had first-hand
knowledge of that.

We corroborated the relationship with Iran to a lesser extent but to a
solid extent. And then we had information from Al-Fadl, who we believe was
truthful, learning from others that there were also was efforts to try to
work with Iraq. That was the basis for what we put in that indictment.
Clearly, we put Sudan in the first order at that time as being the partner
of Al Qaida.

We understood the relationship with Iran but Iraq, we understood, went from
a position where they were working against each other to a standing down
against each other. And we understood they were going to explore the
possibility of working on weapons together.

That's my piece of what I know. I don't represent to know everything else,
so I can't tell you, well, what we've learned since then. But there was
that relationship that went from opposing each other to not opposing each
other to possibly working with each other.


FIELDING: Thank you. That's very helpful.

-----------------------------------------------

Ignoring the connection: Why?
What the Administration Said Then, and What the Commission Says Now
June 17, 2004
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/006935.php

President Bush talked to reporters this morning, and addressed the 9/11
commission staff report on Iraq. Here is how Fox News reports the
President's exchange with the press:

President Bush repeated his assertions Thursday that Saddam Hussein
and Al Qaeda had a relationship before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks.

The president added that he did not infer that the two had a
"collaborative relationship" on the attacks, a conclusion rejected
by the commission investigating the intelligence failures that
prevented the United States from warding off the attacks.

"There was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Bush insisted
to reporters following a meeting with his Cabinet at the White
House. This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were
orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda," he said.

"We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and
Al Qaeda, for example, Iraqi intelligence agents met with [Usama]
bin Laden, the head of Al Qaeda in Sudan."

The president added that Saddam gave safe haven to Al Qaeda
associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.


All of which is unquestionably true.

Press coverage of the commission staff's report universally says or implies
that it contradicts, and refutes, statements made by the Bush
administration about the Iraq/al Qaeda connection prior to the Iraq war.
However, if one reviews what the administration actually said on the
subject prior to the Iraq war--for example, Colin Powell's United Nations
speech of February 2003--it is striking how little the staff report even
purports to contradict, let alone refute, the administration. Here is what
Powell told the U.N. in February 2003:

Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his
al-Qaida lieutenants.

This was the main focus of Powell's discussion of al Qaeda; what he said
was indisputably true. Astonishingly, the staff's discussion of connections
between Iraq and al Qaeda never mentions Zarqawi or his network. This
omission renders the staff's conclusions meaningless, if not laughable.

We are not surprised that Iraq is harboring Zarqawi and his
subordinates. This understanding builds on decades-long experience
with respect to ties between Iraq and al-Qaida. Going back to the
early and mid-1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan, an al-Qaida
source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding
that al-Qaida would no longer support activities against Baghdad.
Early al-Qaida ties were forged by secret high-level intelligence
service contacts with al-Qaida, secret Iraqi intelligence high-level
contacts with al-Qaida.

These statements are repeated, in substance, in the commission staff's
Statement No. 15.

We know members of both organizations met repeatedly and have met at
least eight times at very senior levels since the early 1990s. In
1996, a foreign security service tells us that bin Laden met with a
senior Iraqi intelligence official in Khartoum and later met the
director of the Iraqi intelligence service.

The staff report doesn't contradict these statements; it alludes vaguely to
"reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin
Laden had returned to Afghanistan...."

A detained al-Qaida member tells us that Saddam was more willing to
assist al-Qaida after the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania. Saddam was also impressed by al-Qaida's attacks on the
USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.

Nothing in the staff report contradicts these statements.

A senior defector, one of Saddam's former intelligence chiefs in
Europe, says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan sometime in the
mid-1990s to provide training to al-Qaida members on document
forgery

Nothing in the staff report contradicts this statement.

Al-Qaida continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of
mass destruction. As with the story of Zarqawi and his network, I
can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq
provided training in these weapons to al-Qaida. Fortunately, this
operative is now detained and he has told his story. I will relate
it to you now as he, himself, described it.

This senior al-Qaida terrorist was responsible for one of al-Qaida's
training camps in Afghanistan. His information comes firsthand from
his personal involvement at senior levels of al-Qaida. He says bin
Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan, deceased al-Qaida leader
Muhammad Atif, did not believe that al-Qaida labs in Afghanistan
were capable enough to manufacture these chemical or biological
agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside
of Afghanistan for help.

Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq. The
support that this detainee describes included Iraq offering chemical
or biological weapons training for two al-Qaida associates beginning
in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abdallah al-Iraqi
had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help
in acquiring poisons and gasses. Abdallah al-Iraqi characterized the
relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.


Nothing in the staff report contradicts these statements.

In fact, what the Bush administration said about the relationship between
Iraq and al Qaeda prior to the war was cautious and restrained. If the 9/11
commission has information that contradicts, let alone refutes, the
specific factual claims made by administration spokesmen, it has not
disclosed that information in the staff report.

-----------------------------------------------

CHENEY: CLEAR LINKS BETWEEN SADDAM, AL-QAEDA;
CALLS NY TIMES ARTICLE 'OUTRAGEOUS'
Thu Jun 17 2004 19:00:33 ET
http://www.drudgereport.com/flash3.htm

In an EXCLUSIVE interview with CNBC's 'Capital Report':

Vice President Dick Cheney said that there were clearly ties between Saddam
Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists, and he called the New York Times
coverage of the story "outrageous."

The vice president was responding to a report from the 9-11 Commission
saying it had found no evidence of "collaboration" between Iraq and Al
Qaeda.

ALAN MURRAY, co-host:

Hello and welcome to CAPITAL REPORT. I'm Alan Murray. Our top story
tonight, the 9-11 Commission ended its hearings today with some surprising
news. Among other things, the panel says it's found no evidence that Saddam
Hussein collaborated with al-Qaida terrorists, seeming to contradict the
White House, which has emphasized links between the two. In a CNBC
exclusive tonight, we get Vice President Dick Cheney's first reaction to
today's news.

My partner, Gloria Borger, is with the vice president in the battleground
state of Ohio, where he campaigned in Lewis City, just outside of Columbus,
today. Gloria.

GLORIA BORGER, co-host:

That's right, Alan. We are at NexTech Materials, which is a high-tech
manufacturer in Lewis Center, Ohio. Of course, as you know, the vice
president just gave a speech here this afternoon. John Kerry has also been
here this week and, as you mentioned, Ohio is, of course, a battleground
state.

Thank you so much for being with us, Mr. Vice President. And we will get to
talk about the economy in a few minutes.

Vice President DICK CHENEY: OK.

BORGER: But obviously first the news of the week is the 9-11 Commission
report. And as you know, the report found, quote, "No credible evidence
that al-Qaida collaborated with Iraq or Saddam Hussein. Do you disagree
with its findings?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I disagree with the way their findings have been
portrayed. This has been enormous confusion over the Iraq-al-Qaida
connection, Gloria. First of all, on the question of whether or not there
was any kind of a relationship, there clearly was a relationship. It's been
testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s.

It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts between Osama
bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials. It involves a senior official,
a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service going to the Sudan
before bin Laden ever went to Afghanistan to train them in bomb-making,
helping teach them how to forge documents. Mr. Zarqawi, who's in Baghdad
today, is an al-Qaida associate who took refuge in Baghdad, found sanctuary
and safe harbor there before we ever launched into Iraq. There's a Mr.
Yasin, who was a World Trade Center bomber in '93, who fled to Iraq after
that and we found since when we got into Baghdad, documents showing that he
was put on the payroll and given housing by Saddam Hussein after the '93
attack; in other words, provided safe harbor and sanctuary. There's clearly
been a relationship.

There's a separate question. The separate question is: Was Iraq involved
with al-Qaida in the attack on 9/11?

BORGER: Was Iraq involved?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: We don't know. You know, what the commission says is
that they can't find any evidence of that. We had one report which is a
famous report on the Czech intelligence service and we've never been able
to confirm or to knock it down.

BORGER: Well, let me just get to the bottom line here...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: But it's very important that people understand these two
differences. What The New York Times did today was outrageous. They do a
lot of outrageous things but the headline, Panel Find Qaida-Iraq Tie. The
press wants to run out and say there's a fundamental split here now between
what the president said and what the commission said. Jim Thompson is a
member of the commission who's since been on the air. I saw him with my own
eyes. And there's no conflict. What they were addressing was whether or not
they were involved in 9/11. And there they found no evidence to support
that proposition. They did not address the broader question of a
relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida in other areas, in other ways.

BORGER: Well, my reading of the report is that it says that, yes, contacts
were made between al-Qaida and Iraq, but they could find no evidence that
any relationship, in fact, had been forged between al-Qaida and Iraq.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: And you're talking generally now, not just 9/11.

BORGER: Not just 9/11. And let's talk generally and then we'll get to 9/11.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Talk generally.

BORGER: Generally.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: That's not true.

BORGER: So you disagree?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Absolutely. Look at the Zarqawi case. Here's a man who's
Jordanian by birth. He's described as an al-Qaida associate. He ran
training camps in Afghanistan back before we went to war in Afghanistan.
After we went in and hit his training camp, he fled to Baghdad. Found safe
harbor and sanctuary in Baghdad in May of 2002. He arrived with about two
dozen other supporters of his, members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which
was Zawahiri's organization. He's the number two to bin Laden, which was
merged with al-Qaida interchangeably. Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaida,
same-same. They're all now part of one organization. They merged some years
ago. So Zarqawi living in Baghdad. We arranged for information to be passed
on his presence in Baghdad to the Iraqis through a third-party intelligence
service. They did that twice. There's no question but what Saddam Hussein
really was there. He was allowed to operate out of Baghdad. He ran the
poisons fact ory in northern Iraq out of Baghdad, which became

BORGER: Now some say that he corresponded with al-Qaida only after Saddam
was deposed.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: That's not true. He had been involved working side by
side, as described by the CIA, with al-Qaida over the years. This is an old
established relationship. He's the man who killed our man Foley in Jordan,
an AID official, during this period of time. To suggest that there's no
connection between Zarqawi, no relationship if you will, and Iraq just
simply is not true.

BORGER: Well, let's get to Mohammad Atta for a minute, because you
mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was, quote,
"pretty well confirmed."

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, I never said that.

BORGER: OK.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Never said that.

BORGER: I think that is...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Absolutely not. What I said was the Czech intelligence
service reported after 9/11 that Atta had been in Prague on April 9th of
2001, where he allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence official. We have
never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down.

BORGER: Well, now this report says it didn't happen.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No. This report says they haven't found any evidence.

BORGER: That it happened.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Right.

BORGER: But you haven't found the evidence that it happened either, have
you?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No. All we have is that one report from the Czechs. We
just don't know.

BORGER: So does this put it to rest for you or not on Atta?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: It doesn't add anything from my perspective. I mean, I
still am a skeptic. I can't refute the Czech plan. I can't prove the Czech
plan. It's ...(unintelligible) the nature of the intelligence
(unintelligible).

BORGER: OK, but let's...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: But that is a separate question from what the press has
gotten all in a dither about, The New York Times especially, on this other
question. What they've done is, I think, distorted what the commission
actually reported, certainly according to Governor Thompson, who's a member
of the commission.

BORGER: But you say you disagree with the commission...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: On this question of whether or not there was a general
relationship.

BORGER: Yes.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Yeah.

BORGER: And they say that there was not one forged and you were saying yes,
that there was. Do you know things that the commission does not know?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Probably.

BORGER: And do you think the commission needs to know them?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I don't have any--I don't know what they know. I do know
they didn't talk with any original sources on this subject that say that in
their report.

BORGER: They did talk with people who had interrogated sources.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Right.

BORGER: So they do have good sources.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Gloria, the notion that there is no relationship between
Iraq and al-Qaida just simply is not true. I'm going to read this material
here. Your show isn't long enough for me to read all the pieces...

BORGER: Sure it is.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: ...but in the fall of '95 and again in the summer of
'96, bin Laden met with Iraqi intelligence service representatives at his
farm in Sudan. Bin Laden asked for terror training from Iraq. The Iraqi
intelligence service responded. It deployed a bomb-making expert, a
brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence.

BORGER: OK, but now just let me stop you there, because what this report
says is that he was not given the support that he had asked for from Iraq,
that he had requested all of these things but, in fact, did not get them.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: He got this. We know for a fact. This is from George
Tenet's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee February 12th,
2003, etc. I mean, it's there. It's ...(unintelligible).

BORGER: So is the commission credible as far as you're concerned?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I haven't read their entire report on everything. I
think they're doing good work. I think it's a very tough job they've been
doing and I don't mean to be overly critical of them. I think this is not
an area they looked at. According to Governor Thompson again, they didn't
spend a lot of time on the question of Iraq and al-Qaida except for the
9/11 proposition.

That's what they're asked to look at. They did not spend a lot of time on
these other issues. They've got one paragraph in the report that talks
about that. And so the notion that you can take one paragraph from the 9-11
Commission and say, `Ah, therefore that says there was never a connection
between Iraq and al-Qaida.' It's just wrong. It's not true. I'd love to go
on on all of this stuff, but the fact of the matter is there clearly was a
relationship there. Now...

BORGER: Let me just ask you, bottom line, though, on 9/11...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: On 9/11...

BORGER: ...Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: We have never been able to prove that there was a
connection there on 9/11. The one thing we have is the Czech intelligence
service report saying that Mohammad Atta had met with the senior Iraqi
intelligence official at the embassy on April 9th, 2001. That's never been
proven. It's never been refuted.

BORGER: OK. And let me ask you one more personal note. The commission also
reported today that you gave the order to shoot down those airplanes that
were commandeered by the terrorists but that your orders never reached the
American pilots. Can you tell us how agonizing that was?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Well, actually it went very fast. First of all, I
discussed it with the president. The president made the decision. Then I
was asked sometime after that--an officer came into the emergency
operations center into the White House where I was located and wanted to
know if they were authorized to shoot down the aircraft. And based on my
earlier discussion with the president I said yes. I didn't spend a lot of
time thinking about it. They needed a fast decision. There was a report of
an airplane 80 miles out headed towards the White House and towards
Washington.

So it was a quick decision. It had to be quick. Planes were flying 500
miles an hour at buildings. It turned out--we didn't know this at the
timeÑit turned out that by the time the order was given, the plane that was
headed that way--United 93--had crashed. The passengers had obviously...

BORGER: Had your order gotten to the planes?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No.

BORGER: Would that happen another time? I mean, is that fixed?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Well, is it fixed? I think it is now, but at the time,
nobody had ever trained for or planned on having American fighters shoot
down American commercial airliners. That's not a drill that, you know,
anybody's ever practiced before and it's not clear that day that if the
pilot had received that order that he would have quickly and instantly
followed it. It would have been a hard thing to do to fall in on a United
Airlines flight and shoot it out of the sky if you're up there with--an
American flying an F-15.

So again, what we know now based on the timelines and so forth that were
established is that by the time that order was transmitted, United 93 had
already gone down because of the action of the passengers.

BORGER: Let me ask you what your response is to the Democratic presidential
candidate, John Kerry, who said upon looking at this 9/11 report that this
administration, quote, "misled America."

Vice Pres. CHENEY: In what respect? I haven't seen that.

BORGER: In terms of the relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: We never said that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. We
never said that. You can't find any place where I said it, where the
president said it. I was asked that, as a matter of fact, by Tim Russert on
"Meet the Press" on the Sunday after the attack and said, `No, we don't
have any evidence of it.' Later on we received this information from the
Czechs, but again, as I say, we've never been able to prove that nor have
we been able to knock it down.

BORGER: Now the report says, though, that there isn't any relationship,
so...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: They've concluded, based on what they've done.

BORGER: And you're not there.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: They've concluded and I haven't had a chance to read all
of their report. They've concluded based on the work they've done that
there was no connection, that Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. And I
can't say they were. I've never seen evidence that supports that, except
this one report from the Czechs.

BORGER: Are we close to getting Osama bin Laden?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I think we will get Osama bin Laden. I wouldn't want to
put a time frame on it. We're actively in the hunt. We have been now for
some considerable period of time and I think eventually we'll run him to
ground.

BORGER: Now recently the Saudis have also been victims of al-Qaida. There
was an attack that killed 22 people. Now an American is being held hostage
there. The family of this hostage, Paul Johnson Jr., has asked for the
release of al-Qaida detainees so he can be released. What's your response
to their request?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Well, we're working closely with the Saudis on this
matter. We're--our officials have been in touch with the Johnson family, as
it should be. We do not, as a general proposition, believe it makes any
sense to negotiate with hostage takers. All you do when you do that is put
a price on the head of every other American out there. If, in fact, the
terrorists can come capture an American and trade him for 12 of their own
who are in custody for their past murderous acts, then you will almost
guarantee there will be further kidnappings. So as a general proposition,
the policy of this administration and our predecessors has always been you
don't negotiate with terrorists.

BORGER: In hindsight, Mr. Vice President, are you disappointed in the
quality of the intelligence that you received before launching an attack
against Iraq?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I can't say that, Gloria. I think the decision we made
was exactly the right one. Everything I know today, everything the
president knows today, we would have done exactly the same thing. Saddam
Hussein was an evil man. He'd launched two wars. He'd produced and used
weapons of mass destruction in the past. He had provided safe harbor and
sanctuary for terrorists. He was paying $25,000 a pop to the families of
suicide bombers who'd kill Israelis. He hosted Abu Nidal in Baghdad,
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, had established a relationship with al-Qaida.
This was an evil man who had tried previously to expand his influence in
the area and we did exactly the right thing.

Now could we have better intelligence? You always want better intelligence.
If you had complete knowledge on these kinds of decisions and issues, you
wouldn't need a president to make the decision; some robot could. The
President has to make judgments. You go to the president of the United
States and you lay down a very strong case that this guy is all the things
I've said plus had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction program,
tell him it's a slam dunk case and you've got the ongoing evidence of a
relationship with al-Qaida and we had 9/11. 9/11 changed a lot. Remember
what happened after 9/11. We said henceforth we will no longer make a
distinction between the terrorists and states that sponsor or have safe
harbor sanctuary for terrorists. If you're going to host a terrorist,
you're going to be held responsible for their actions just as much as the
terrorists are, which is what we did in Afghanistan. And it's very
important for us to remember that when 9/11 occurred, it forced us to look
at the wo

BORGER: Mr. Vice President, I don't think I've ever seen you, in all the
years I've interviewed you, as exercised about something as you seem today.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I was. I admit, Gloria, and you and I have known each
other a long time. But I do believe that the press has been irresponsible,
that there's this temptation to take...

BORGER: But the press is making a distinction between 9/11 and...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, they're not. They're not. The New York Times does
not. The Panel Finds No Qaida-Iraq Ties. That's what it says. That's the
vaunted New York Times. Numerous--I've watched a lot of the coverage on it
and the fact of the matter is they don't make a distinction. They fuzz it
up. Sometimes it's through ignorance. Sometimes it's malicious. But you'll
take a statement that's geared specifically to say there's no connection in
relation to the 9/11 attack and then say, `Well, obviously there's no case
here.' And then jump over to challenge the president's credibility or my
credibility and say ...(unintelligible).

BORGER: Do you feel it's your personal credibility on the line, because
obviously you have been portrayed as...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, I'm grateful. I...

BORGER: ...the hard-liner in the administration...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No.

BORGER: ...somebody who's...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Gloria, I don't feel persecuted. I don't need to. The
fact of the matter is, the evidence is overwhelming. The press is, with all
due respect, and there are exceptions, oftentimes lazy, oftentimes simply
reports what somebody else in the press said without doing their homework.

BORGER: But it's the commission that reached--I mean, I know. I don't want
to go back over the old ground here, but...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, but you need to go back and look...

BORGER: OK.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: ...at what Governor Jim Thompson said today about his
conclusion as a commissioner based on the work that's been done; that they
focused on 9/11. Their conclusion based on what they've seen on 9/11 is
there was no Iraqi involvement, but he said, we did not address the rest of
it. That was not our mission. That wasn't our assignment, to look at the
broader relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.

BORGER: OK, Mr. Vice President, we are here in Ohio and I promised you that
I would talk about the economy, so I will do that.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: It's very important.

BORGER: It is an important subject. State by state job numbers are coming
out tomorrow. You're here in a must-win state for either party. Your
administration says that 1.2 million jobs have been created this year. John
Kerry says 1.2 million fewer people are employed since you took office. So
what do you say to that and what do you say to the 200,000 or so people in
Ohio who are still out of work?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Well, the unemployment rate in Ohio has dropped from 6.2
percent to 5.8 percent. The Ohio economy is improving significantly just
like the economy across the rest of the country. I said the economy is
growing by 5 percent over the past year. That's the fastest rate of growth
since the first Reagan term, nearly 20 years ago. I look at real personal
disposable income and it's up 3.3 percent in the last year. In the last
year of the Clinton administration it was only 1.4 percent, so it's almost
three times as fast. If you look at inflation, if you look at interest
rates, if you look at productivity, if you look at housing starts, if you
look at manufacturing, everything's moving in the right direction. This is
a very strong economy. It's getting stronger. I've heard John Kerry say
this is the worst economy since the Great Depression. That's just wrong.
And anybody who hears that says, `What the hell's he talking about?' He
doesn't know what he's talking about obviously. And I think this noti

BORGER: Well, he talked about--he's been talking about a middle-class
squeeze this week, even in this state, saying job loss is rising, health-
care costs, huge budget deficits that are going to result in cuts in social
programs.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: If John Kerry had had his way, there would be no
economic recovery today because he voted against the Bush tax cuts. He
would not support the very policies we put in place, cutting tax rates,
getting rid of the child tax credit, increasing their credit and reducing
the marriage penalty, providing greater expensing for companies like this
one right here, NexTech, and allow them to invest and go out and buy new
equipment and hire more people. All of those policies flow directly out of
the tax policies that we put in place in 2001, 2002 and 2003. John Kerry
opposed it.

BORGER: Well, do we need more tax cuts now?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: There would be no economic recovery today if John Kerry
had had his way. His problem is he's got to try and find some way to create
a sense of disappointment and pessimism about the economy and that's
exactly what he's doing.

BORGER: Do we need more tax cuts?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: We need to make the ones we've got permanent. That's the
most important thing, because the way the Senate rules work, the ones that
we put in place will expire over the next few years unless we make them
permanent. And when those cuts expire, that'll result in a tax increase on
the American people and that's exactly the wrong medicine.

BORGER: And, Mr. Vice President, what do you say to people who argue that
the gap between the wealthy and the poor has grown?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I look at numbers that point out the extent to which we
have reduced the taxes on everybody in America who pays income taxes. That
the average reduction for a family in the US has been $1,500 from those
cuts and, as I say, things like real disposable personal income, which is
probably the best measure of all of what people have in their pockets. It's
the after tax income and it includes benefits they receive on the job. And
that is growing by leaps and bounds because of the policies we put in
place.

BORGER: Now just to go to a few more subjects sort of potpourri very
quickly, there is obviously as you know an ongoing investigation into who
within the Bush administration may have leaked the name of a covert CIA
operative to Bob Novak, who is a columnist in The Washington Post. Can you
say that no one in your office was involved in this?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Gloria, you need--you get the same answer the president
gives when he gets asked this question. This is a matter that is being
looked at by the Justice Department. You need to go to the Justice
Department if you have any questions about the matter.

BORGER: And that's all you'll say on that?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: That's all.

BORGER: Let me also ask you about the vice presidency. Obviously now John
Kerry is in the process of trying to pick his vice president. If you were
to wake up tomorrow and discover that, say, John Edwards was going to be
the person who was going to debate you, what would come to mind?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I'd first start out by thinking about the last debate
against Joe Lieberman four years ago, which I enjoyed and I thought was a
good debate between the two of us. Vice presidents only get to debate once
during the course of the campaign. That's probably enough. I'm not sure the
country could tolerate more than that. But I look forward to it, whoever it
is. I don't know who John Kerry's going to pick. I don't have any idea. But
whoever it is, I would expect we'll both do our parts and the debate's an
important part of that.

BORGER: Any advice for John Kerry's running mate, whomever he may be--or
she?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Well, I offered to head up his search committee but he
didn't accept the offer.

BORGER: Any other advice?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No.

BORGER: No. Let me just ask you one final question, Mr. Vice President. And
that is, for better or worse, your public image in this administration over
these last few years has become that of the enforcer. You are an
influential foreign policy hard-liner, some would say. You are the hawk in
this administration. You are somebody the president listens to. You're the
man who had to tell Secretary O'Neil it was time for him to go. So you are
the enforcer. Is all of that you?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Oh, I don't know if I would describe myself in quite
those terms, but I can't quarrel with what you said basically. I'm hear to
serve the president. I retired from public life in 1993, when I left the
Defense Department. The only reason I came back is because he asked me to
come back as his running mate. It's been a fascinating four years. I
wouldn't have missed it for the world but I'm here to do what he needs to
have done.

There's always a temptation on the part of people outside, especially in
the press, trying to understand and explain what's happening, to try to
attribute what happens in the administration to the subordinates. But the
most accurate portrayal is the president of the United States makes the
decision and this one especially is actively and aggressively engaged
across the board. My job is to offer advice, which I do, to take on
assignments which he gives me, which I do, but I say I'm there specifically
to serve him any way I can and not worry a lot about what my public image
might be. Am I warm and fuzzy or am I perceived as a tough guy? I really
don't worry about that. This is probably my last fling in public life and I
have no plans to run for anything else when I get through here and I've
enjoyed immensely the privilege of serving and look forward to four more
years.

BORGER: Mr. Vice President, thank you so much for being with us on CAPITAL
REPORT.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Thank you very much.

BORGER: And back to you, Alan.

MURRAY: Thank you, Gloria. Some very harsh words there for the press, The
New York Times in particular, and Senator John Kerry. Gloria will join me
after the break for more on this interview with Vice President Dick Cheney.
Then later we're going to get reaction to the 9/11 hearings from former New
York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in an exclusive interview. That and more when
CAPITAL REPORT continues on CNBC. ##