A couple of months ago, I put up a timeline here outlining what we knew, so far, about Bush/Cheney and torture.
Since then, even more information has surfaced, and Cheney has twisted history even more into a pretzel (and this time, it's not Bush who's choking on it). So I thought it time for another timeline, this one showing some of Cheney's various claims at various times.
Herewith submitted for your approval:
14 Nov 2001 Cheney says 9/11 highjacker Mohammed Atta was "in Prague in April of this year, as well as earlier...." to meet Iraqi agents. [Link is to CommonDreams; the links to the actual quote no longer work.]
9 Dec 2001 Cheney says "it's been pretty well confirmed" that Atta was in Prague to
meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point. But that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.
Late Dec 2001 Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi is captured in Pakistan. After being tortured in Egypt, he claims there are links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Feb 2002 A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report strongly questions the value of al-Libi's evidence, saying he "was [probably] intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ about Iraqi support of Al-Qaeda.
Aug 2002 Bush administration officials promote links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. A CNN Inside Politics analysis finds the evidence unpersuasive.
August 2002 (or earlier) Captured Al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydeh is waterboarded numerous times in an effort to get him to state there was a link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. However, according to the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report:
During the debrefings, Abu Zubaydah offered his opinion that it would be extremely unlikely for Bin Laden to have agreed to ally with Iraq, due to his desire to keep organization on track with its mission and maintain its operational independence. [Ibid]
8 Sep 2002 Cheney again describes Atta as meeting in Prague with Iraqi agents, though this time he says "it’s unconfirmed at this point." But he insists there is "a pattern of relationships going back many years" between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.
Late 2002-Early 2003 Cheney and Rumsfeld pressure interrogators for evidence linking Saddam to Al-Qaeda.
"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."
Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said. McClatchy 21 Apr 2009
30 Jan 2003 In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), Cheney tells them Saddam protects terrorists, specifically naming Al-Qaeda, and that the Iraqi dictator could decide to provide weapons of mass destruction secretly to terrorists for use against America.
1 Mar 2003 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, number 3 in the Al-Qaeda command, is captured, and subjected to waterboarding.
Some of the first questions asked of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed upon his capture and during the time during which he was waterboarded were about possible connections between al Qaeda and Iraq. HuffPo 15 May 2009
16 Mar 2003 Four days before the Iraq war starts, Cheney says in a Meet the Press interview that
But we also have to address the question of where might these terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons? And Saddam Hussein becomes a prime suspect in that regard because of his past track record and because we know he has, in fact, developed these kinds of capabilities, chemical and biological weapons. We know he’s used chemical weapons. We know he’s reconstituted these programs since the Gulf War. We know he’s out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization. ...
But the—again, I come back to this proposition—Is it cost-free? Absolutely not. But the cost is far less than it will be if we get hit, for example, with a weapon that Saddam Hussein might provide to al-Qaeda....
14 Sep 2003 On MTP, Cheney says we have learned that
[T]here was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organization.
He also repeats the charge about Atta in Prague, though this time he says it was the Czechs who made the accusation, and that we "just don't know."
Jan 2004 The CIA withdraws its claim to a tie between Iraq and Al-Qaeda based on al-Libi's evidence. (In May 2009, al-Libi dies in a Libyan prison, an "apparent suicide.")
17 Jun 2004 Cheney insists the "[t]he evidence is overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and that press reports saying the 9/11 commission found no such relationship are "irresponsible."
22 Jul 2004 The 9/11 Commission releases its final report (PDF), stating that
[T]o date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts [between Al-Qaeda and Iraq] ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship.
10 Sep 2006 Cheney says "We’ve never been able to confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11" and that while at one time the CIA "said it had been pretty well confirmed that [Atta]'d been in Prague" but later backed off on it. He adds that George Tenet had shown a relationship between Iraq and Al-Qaeda "that went back at least a decade...."
10 Mar 2008 Exhaustive review [by the Pentagon] finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida. (Saddam had links to other Middle East terror groups, according to the study, mainly aimed at his enemies: Iraqi exiles, Shiites and Kurds.)
3 Jun 2009 Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he does not believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning or execution of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
"I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true," Cheney conceded.
But Hussein was "somebody who provided sanctuary and safe harbor and resources to terrorists. ... [It] is, without question, a fact."
Cheney restated his claim that "there was a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. It's not something I made up. ... We know for a fact that Saddam Hussein was a sponsor -- a state sponsor -- of terror. It's not my judgment. That was the judgment of our [intelligence community] and State Department."
As the clips above show, Cheney started out saying we had evidence of a link between Atta, the 9/11 highjacker, and Saddam. Over time, he started shading it, saying it wasn't clear, or that it was the Czechs who were saying so, and so on. He uses just enough weasel wording in each of the interviews that he can argue that nothing he says now contradicts what he said then. It is a stretch, but he's left himself the openings to try.
But on the connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda generally, he is directly flying in the face of the 9/11 Commission and the Pentagon report. Although here, too, he is setting up a weasel situation, subtly conflating Saddam's support for Hamas suicide bombers and anti-Shia and anti-Kurd terror groups with support for Al-Qaeda.