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Former Vice President Dick Cheney says there was “never any evidence” that
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq played any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
on New York and Washington.
“On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never
any evidence to prove that,” Cheney said during an interview Monday night with
Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren.
“There was some reporting early on, for example, that Mohammed Atta had met with
a senior Iraqi intelligence official,” Cheney said. “But that was never borne
out.”
In a 2003 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Cheney said that “the Czechs
alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi
intelligence official five months before the attack.”
But Cheney added, “We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet, either
in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.”
Cheney said Monday that former CIA Director George Tenet brought to the Bush
White House information pertaining to potential links between the hijacker and
Iraq as “it became available.” But Cheney pointed out that Tenet “did say and
did testify that there was an ongoing relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq,
but no proof that Iraq was involved in 9/11.”
The former vice president explained away the early uncertainty of the connection
by insisting that intelligence gathering is “more an art form than a science,”
pointing to several examples of past CIA failures.
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“They misread Saddam Hussein's intent when he invaded Kuwait in 1990,” Cheney
said. “They underestimated the extent of the Iraqi program to try to acquire
nuclear capability back in '90 and '91. They missed 9/11.”
Cheney did not list the never-found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as an
intelligence failure, saying only that the CIA and the broader intelligence
community have done a “magnificent job as part of the effort to keep the United
States safe these last seven and a half years.”
“The intelligence community has had some enormous successes in the last few
years,” he said. “You usually don't hear about the successes. What you hear
about are the train wrecks, the things that didn't work out quite right.” |
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