During a speech before the James Madison Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Florida, Vice President Dick Cheney states that Saddam Hussein “had long-established ties with al-Qaeda.” [Associated Press, 6/14/2004]
June 15, 2004: President Bush Continues to Maintain There Was Al-Qaeda-Hussein Relationship
President Bush repeats the US government claim that al-Qaeda had links to the Saddam Hussein government of Iraq, suggesting that militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the link between the two. “Al-Zarqawi’s the best evidence of a connection to al-Qaeda affiliates and al-Qaeda. He’s the person who’s still killing.” [CNN, 6/15/2004]
June 15, 2004: Bush Claims Hussein Was Linked to ‘Terrorist Organizations’
President Bush defends Vice President Dick Cheney’s claim this week that Saddam Hussein had longstanding ties with al-Qaeda. Speaking at a news conference with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, Bush asserts that Hussein “had ties to terrorist organizations.” He does not mention al-Qaeda by name. The day before, Cheney claimed that Hussein was “a patron of terrorism” and said “he had long established ties with al-Qaeda” (see June 14, 2004). [Boston Globe, 6/16/2004]
June 17, 2004: Cheney Refuses to Abandon ‘Prague Connection’ Theory
Vice President Dick Cheney, infuriated by the 9/11 Commission’s intent to report that no serious connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda ever existed (see July 12, 2004) and the media’s acceptance of the same position, decides to launch a media counterattack. His first target is not the Commission itself, but the media, particularly the New York Times, which has just published a front-page article entitled “Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie.” Cheney’s first appearance is on CNBC’s Capital Report. Correspondent Gloria Borger notes, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you… as exercised about something as you seem today.” Cheney leads off by calling the Times reporting “outrageous,” and accuses the newspaper of manufacturing a division between the administration’s claims of a “Qaeda-Iraq tie” and the Commission’s report that no such ties ever existed. “There’s no conflict,” he says. He asserts that “[W]e don’t know” if Iraq was involved in 9/11 and adds that no one has “been able to confirm” or “knock… down” the claim that 9/11 plotter Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in April of 2001. Reporters who doubt the connection are “lazy,” he says. When Borger notes that Commission investigators have found no evidence to support that allegation, Cheney asserts that he “probably” knows information the 9/11 Commission does not. [CNN, 6/18/2004; Shenon, 2008, pp. 381-385] A few days later, the Commission says that after asking Cheney for any additional evidence he might have, they stand by their position. Cheney maintains his position as well, but does not turn over any new evidence. [Los Angeles Times, 7/2/2004; Shenon, 2008, pp. 381-385]
June 17, 2004: Bush Defends Claims of Relationship between Iraq and Al-Qaeda
President Bush forcefully disputes statements by the 9/11 Commission (see July 12, 2004) that there was no evidence of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda. “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda,” Bush says. [CNN, 6/17/2004; Washington Post, 6/18/2004]
After June 17, 2004: 9/11 Commissioners Unsettled by Cheney’s Media Attack over Lack of Al-Qaeda-Iraq Link; Staff Reviews Evidence Again
Several 9/11 Commission members, including chairman Thomas Kean and vice-chairman Lee Hamilton, are alarmed at Vice President Dick Cheney’s response to the commission’s claim that no link exists between Iraq and al-Qaeda (see June 17, 2004). They have no desire to go toe-to-toe with an enraged White House over the question. Hamilton privately asks Doug MacEachin, the principal author of that portion of the report, to go back and sift the evidence again to ensure that he missed nothing that might bear out the White House’s arguments. Publicly, Kean and Hamilton are much more resolute. If Cheney has information that he has not shared with the commission, as Cheney has implied, he needs to turn it over promptly. “I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about,” Hamilton says. [Shenon, 2008, pp. 381-385] No more evidence is found, and the commission ultimately sticks by their conclusions.
July 1, 2004: Tenet Says CIA Is ‘Increasingly Skeptical’ about Alleged Atta-Iraqi Agent Meeting
In a statement to Congress on July 1, 2004, CIA Director George Tenet doubts that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague in April 2001. He says, “Although we cannot rule it out, we are increasingly skeptical that such a meeting occurred.” He adds that Atta “would have been unlikely to undertake the substantial risk of contacting any Iraqi official” at such a date. [New York Times, 7/9/2004]
July 12, 2004: 9/11 Commission Concludes There’s No Evidence Iraq Had 9/11 Role
The 9/11 Commission publicly concludes that there was “no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States” and that repeated contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda “do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.” It also again confirms that it does not believe the alleged April 2001 Prague meeting between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi diplomat Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani (see 1999) ever took place, a conclusion it had made in a public staff statement the month before (see June 16, 2004). [New York Times, 7/12/2004]
August 6, 2004: Clinton Questions Bush Prioritizing Iraq over Al-Qaeda
Former president Bill Clinton questions the priorities of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” asking why the administration is issuing groundless terror alerts “[b]ased on four-year-old information” (see August 1, 2004). He asks rhetorically, “Now, who is the threat from? Iraq? Saddam Hussein? No. From bin Laden. And al-Qaeda. How do we know about the threat? Because the Pakistanis found this computer whiz [Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan and got his computer and gave it to us so it could be analyzed (see August 2, 2004). … [W]e basically are dependent on [Pakistan] to find bin Laden…to break in and find the computer people and give it to us because we got all our resources somewhere else in Iraq.” He continues to ask why Bush isn’t focusing on bin Laden: “Why did we put our number one security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis with us playing a supporting role and put all of our military resources into Iraq, which was, I think, at best, our number five security threat[?] After the absence of a peace process in the Middle East, after the conflict between India and Pakistan and all the ties they had to Taliban, after North Korea and their nuclear program. In other words, how did we get to the point where we got 130,000 troops in Iraq and 15,000 in Afghanistan? It’s like saying… Okay, our big problem is bin Laden and al-Qaeda. We now know from the 9/11 Commission, again, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it. Right? We now know that al-Qaeda is an ongoing continuing threat, even though when I was president we took down over 20 of their cells, they still had enough left to do 9/11, and since then, in the Bush years, they’ve taken down over 20 of their cells. But they’re operating with impunity in that mountainous region going back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan and we have only 15,000 troops in that country.…[W]e would have a better chance of catching them if we had 150,000 troops there rather than 15,000.” Asked if the US could have captured bin Laden in the days and months after 9/11, he replies, “[W]e will never know if we could have gotten him because we didn’t make it a priority….” [Canadian Broadcast Corporation, 8/6/2004]
September 13, 2004: British Trial Reveals Truth about Overblown Ricin Plot
On September 13, after two months of legal argument in court, the British trial begins against Kamal Bourgass and his alleged co-conspirators Mouloud Sihali, David Khalef, Sidali Feddag and Mustapha Taleb. The trial reveals the true extent of the capabilities of the so-called “ricin ring.” The same day of the raid, January 5, 2003, chemical weapons experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire had discovered in more accurate tests that the initial positive result for ricin was false: there was no ricin in the flat (see January 5, 2003). This finding was not released publicly for two years. [Independent, 4/17/2005] The trial also reveals that the results of the Porton Down test were not released to police and ministers until March 20, 2003, the day after the war in Iraq begins (see January 7, 2003). [BBC, 9/15/2005] George Smith, a scientist and senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, serves as an expert for some defendants in the trial and confirms that the discovery that the initial ricin finding was a “false positive” was made “well before the outbreak of the war in Iraq.” The alleged ricin plot was used by authorities, including Colin Powell, as evidence against Saddam Hussein’s regime in the build-up to war with Iraq. [Washington Post, 4/14/2005] The “poison recipes” discovered in the raid are found to have come from a website in Palo Alto, California, and are the invention of right-wing survivalist Kurt Saxon. His website sells books and CDs with bomb and poison manufacturing instructions. Journalist Duncan Campbell of the Guardian, called as an expert witness, further demonstrates that the instructions could have come from the Mujahedeen Poisons Handbook, which was written by veterans of the Afghan war and had been on the Internet since 1998. In fact, these recipes were useless in the production of weapons of mass destruction. [Guardian, 4/15/2005] The hysteria over the capabilities of ricin is also laid to rest during the trial. It is made clear that ricin is not a weapon of mass destruction and has only ever been used for one-on-one killings and attempted assassinations. Ricin was used by the Bulgarian secret service to kill dissident Georgi Markov on the streets of London in 1978. Professor Alistair Hay, a prominent authority on toxins, says Bourgass’s attempts to manufacture chemical weapons were “incredibly amateurish and unlikely to succeed.” He dismisses the allegations of suspected Algerian al-Qaeda operative Mohammed Meguerba that ricin would be smeared on door handles. To reliably kill, ricin has to be directly injected; swallowing ricin could kill, but is a thousand times less effective, while touching ricin is even less likely to kill. Hay’s testimony leads to the prosecution dropping Meguerba’s claims. They then suggest that Bourgass planned to smear ricin on toothbrushes, and put them back on a shop’s shelves. Professor Hay tells The Independent that this was a highly ineffective method. “The claims made before the trial about this major ricin plot were very, very questionable,” he says. [Independent, 4/17/2005]