[A-List] Bush Reports No Evidence of Hussein Tie to 9/11

["Sabri Oncu" <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The New York Times, September 18, 2003

Bush Reports No Evidence of Hussein Tie to 9/11
By DAVID E. SANGER

 
WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 - President Bush said today that he had seen no
evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, as the White House tried to correct an assertion that Vice
President Dick Cheney left extremely murky on Sunday.

Mr. Cheney, on "Meet the Press" on NBC-TV, was asked about polls that
showed that a majority of Americans believed that Mr. Hussein had been
involved in the attacks. 

"I think it's not surprising that people make that connection," said Mr.
Cheney, who leads the hawkish wing of the Bush administration. Asked
whether the connection existed, Mr. Cheney said, "We don't know." 

He described Mr. Hussein's reported connections to Al Qaeda, connections
that American intelligence analysts say were not very deep. 

Mr. Bush, asked by a reporter today about that statement, said, "No,
we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September
the 11th," a far more definitive statement than the vice president's. 

"Now, what the vice president said was that he has been involved with Al
Qaeda," Mr. Bush said. "And al-Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda operative, was in
Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat,"
meaning the death of Laurence Foley last October in Jordan.

Mr. Bush said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was "still running loose, involved
with the poisons network," and said, "There's no question that Saddam
Hussein had Al Qaeda ties."

The White House has never said Mr. Hussein was part of the Sept. 11
plot, though from the moment of the attacks there was a search to
determine whether he was linked. As Mr. Bush has described the Iraq
conflict as part of the war on terror, he has drawn a loose connection,
saying that after Sept. 11, 2001, the United States could no longer
tolerate the kind of threat Mr. Hussein posed or risk that Mr. Hussein's
weapons could reach the hands of terrorists. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/18/national/18BUSH.html