On January 9, 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney did an
interview with Rocky Mountain News. The interviewer, M.E. Sprengelmeyer, was a reporter with the 101st in Iraq. He goes on to ask Cheney about a possible Iraq - 9/11 link.
Read below to see what he said in the interview.
Q: It was amazing, yeah. When I was in Iraq, some of the soldiers said they believed they were fighting because of the Sept. 11 attacks and because they thought Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaida. You've repeatedly cited such links. I heard your speech in Denver a while back. But even Secretary of State (Colin) Powell now says there's no smoking guns or concrete evidence proving that connection. I wanted to ask you what you'd say to those soldiers, and were those soldiers misled at all?
CHENEY: Well, there are two issues here. First of all, I don't want to speak to Colin's statements. I'm not familiar with what he said yesterday. Two issues in terms of relationship. One is, was there a relationship between al Qaida and Iraq, between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, or the al Qaida and the Iraqi intelligence service? That's one category of issues. A separate question is, whether or not there was any relationship relative to 9/11. Those are two separate questions and people oftentimes confuse them.
On the separate issue, on the 9/11 question, we've never had confirmation one way or another. We did have reporting that was public, that came out shortly after the 9/11 attack, provided by the Czech government, suggesting there had been a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, and a man named al-Ani(Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani), who was an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, at the embassy there, in April of '01, prior to the 9/11 attacks. It has never been -- we've never been able to collect any more information on that. That was the one that possibly tied the two together to 9/11.
Note his last sentence where he 'suggests' how Iraq and 9/11 are tied together.
What Mr. Vice President fails to state in this interview is that Czech Intelligence were skeptical about this report. Also US Intelligence had records showing Atta was in the United States at the time these meetings occurred.
Later, on January 23, 2004 critics blasted Cheney for his remarks from the same interview regarding his reference to the Weekly Standard article.
"I think it's obscene that the vice president of the United States would say that the 'best source of information' on his claims is a document that his own administration has discredited and condemned," said David Sirota of the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group founded by John Podesta, former chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton.