Vice President Cheney made the following comments today on Saddam-al Qaeda links in an interview on the Tony Snow Show:
Q Mr. Vice President, you have been spending a lot of time in recent days talking about the war on terror and how important it is to take it seriously. The Weekly Standard over the weekend published a long piece by Steve Hayes, who talked about emerging evidence of longstanding ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. You’ve heard it said many times there’s no linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. You’ve heard Democrats beat you and the President about the head and shoulders with this. Were there links to — between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda? THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I think Steve Hayes has done an effective job in his article of laying out a lot of those connections. I hark back to testimony by George Tenet when he was Director of the CIA. He went up before the Senate Intel Committee in open session — this is on public record — and said there was a relationship there that went back 10 years. What was never established was that there was — that — a link between Iraq and the attacks of 9/11. Q Right, and I’ve heard you and the President say that many times. THE VICE PRESIDENT: That’s right. Q And you correct it any time somebody tries to raise it. THE VICE PRESIDENT: That’s right. And so what some people have done is gotten very sloppy and said, well, there was no link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and then jumped to the conclusion that there was no relationship at all with respect to al Qaeda. And the Iraqis — the fact is we know that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were heavily involved with terror. They were carried as a terror-sponsoring state by our State Department for many, many years. Abu Nidal operated out of there; Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Saddam Hussein was making payments to families of suicide bombers. All of this is very well established. And Steve Hayes is of the view — and I think he’s correct — that a lot of those documents that were captured over there that have not yet been evaluated offer additional evidence that, in fact, there was a relationship that stretched over many years between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda organization.
