Cheney: No evidence Iraq involved in 9/11

Uh, no they didn't.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32862-2003Sep5?language=printer

Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds

By Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 6, 2003; Page A01

Nearing the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, seven in 10 Americans continue to believe that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.

...

Bush, in his speeches, did not say directly that Hussein was culpable in the Sept. 11 attacks.

...

"You can say Bush should be faulted for not correcting every single misapprehension, but that's something different than saying they set out deliberately to deceive," said Duke University political scientist Peter D. Feaver. "Since the facts are all over the place, Americans revert to a judgment: Hussein is a bad guy who would do stuff to us if he could."

Key administration figures have largely abandoned any claim that Iraq was involved in the 2001 attacks. "I'm not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a leading hawk on Iraq, said on the Laura Ingraham radio show on Aug. 1.

A top White House official told The Washington Post on July 31: "I don't believe that the evidence was there to suggest that Iraq had played a direct role in 9/11." The official added: "Anything is possible, but we hadn't ruled it in or ruled it out. There wasn't evidence to substantiate that claim."

But the public continues to embrace the connection.

In follow-up interviews, poll respondents were generally unsure why they believed Hussein was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, often describing it as an instinct that came from news reports and their long-standing views of Hussein. For example, Peter Bankers, 59, a New York film publicist, figures his belief that Hussein was behind the attacks "has probably been fed to me in some PR way," but he doesn't know how. "I think that the whole group of people, those with anti-American feelings, they all kind of cooperated with each other," he said.

Similarly, Kim Morrison, 32, a teacher from Plymouth, Ind., described her belief in Hussein's guilt as a "gut feeling" shaped by television. "From what we've heard from the media, it seems like what they feel is that Saddam and the whole al Qaeda thing are connected," she said.

 

Seems to me Keith Olbermann is the liar. I've watched this video 5 times and Olbermann simply doesn't at all show Bush linking Saddam to 9/11.

[video=youtube;7SUBGtRIiXo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SUBGtRIiXo[/video]

 

Check out this ABC News report from 1999, two years before Bush was sworn in as president.

[video=youtube;u7n3ivH3pCQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7n3ivH3pCQ[/video]

 

So what? Did he say "Saddam or Iraq had something to do with 9/11?"

The administration's position was understandable the whole time. Given what happened on 9/11, we're not going to let a situation fester out there that will come back and bite us later on. The message was quite clear.

Never, ever, not even once, did anyone say "we have to take out Saddam to get revenge for 9/11"

The administration was quite clear that they'd go after regimes that harbored terrorists.

 

They tried to link the two. Remember the "Axis of Evil?"

 

The Axis of Evil was Iraq, Iran, and N. Korea. Didn't mention 9/11 or Al Qaeda among them.

If they thought Iraq was involved, they'd have started bombing and the invasion right away, not a year plus later.

 

That's an easy one. I qualify.

Perhaps you should attempt to correctly refute a single thing I pointed out before pulling that "weak sauce" (I'm also versed in looking things up in Urban Dictionary)