Free Press Releases
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| Cheney has suggested he has
details the panel does not! Sunday, June 20, 2004
The 9/11 panel asks Dick Cheney to tell
them what he knows.
www.cnn.com
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The
9/11 commission wants to see whether Vice
President Dick Cheney can provide any
additional information about possible
ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, the
panel's chairman said Sunday.
Commission Chairman Tom
Kean said he doesn't see "any
serious conflicts" between the
commission's staff reports and the White
House over whether Iraq played a role in
the September 11, 2001, attacks on New
York and Washington.
Both have said there is
no evidence to suggest that then-Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein's government was
involved in those attacks.
"We believe in the
commission that there were a lot more
active contacts, frankly, with Iran and
with Pakistan than there were with
Iraq," Kean told ABC's "This
Week."
"Our investigation
is continuing. We're not finished yet. If
the administration has materials that we
still need to see, I'm sure we'll see
them."
The panel -- known
formally as the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
-- interviewed Cheney and President Bush
for their report on April 29 at the White
House.
In an interview
Thursday on CNBC, Cheney said "we
don't know" whether Iraq was
involved in the 9/11 attacks. Asked
whether he had information the panel did
not, Cheney said, "Probably."
Cheney spokesman Kevin
Kellems said the vice president's office
has not yet received any request for
additional information.
"The
administration has cooperated fully with
the commission and given them
unprecedented access to highly classified
information," Kellems said.
|
The 9/11
commission issued a staff report last
week stating that preliminary contacts
between al Qaeda and Iraq in the 1990s
went nowhere. Commissioners urged the
administration Sunday to share any other
information they might have, and they
emphasized that the staff statements were
not the commission's final conclusions.
"The
chairman and the vice chairman invited
the vice president to produce that
information for our review,"
commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste told
reporters Sunday. "It remains to be
seen if he will take us up on that. We're
in the mode of finishing up on loose ends
and any information will be considered if
it warrants it."
And
commissioner John Lehman said the
commission's report would be updated with
new intelligence "right up until we
go to press."
"As
you know, there are continuing sources of
intelligence, like the interrogations and
the captured documents and so
forth," he said. "And the White
House has promised to see that we receive
them as soon as they do."
|
Lehman also
decried the fact that "everything we come
out with, one side or the other seizes on to make
a political point."
Critics have accused the
administration of exaggerating contacts between
Iraq and al Qaeda in order to support the
U.S.-led invasion that deposed Saddam in 2003.
Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton said
the commission was unable to find evidence
supporting comments by President Bush that Iraq
provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological
weapons training or that an al Qaeda operative
"was sent to Iraq several times in the late
1990s for help in acquiring poisons and
gases."
Bush's comments were part of a
radio address in February 2003, the month before
the invasion.
"I know there was a
request by Osama bin Laden for training,"
Hamilton told ABC. "I'm not sure about the
poisonous gases. And our information, at this
point in time, is that Iraq did not
respond," Hamilton said.
Bush said Thursday that the
administration never claimed the 9/11 attacks
were "orchestrated" between Iraq and al
Qaeda, but that "there were numerous
contacts" between the two under Saddam.
He noted that Iraq also
supported Palestinian militant groups and paid
bounties to the families of suicide bombers, and
he accused Saddam of harboring fugitive Islamic
militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, now blamed
for numerous bloody attacks on U.S. troops and
Iraqi civilians.
Bush has tried to portray the
war in Iraq as the "central front" in
the war on terrorism that began with the 9/11
attacks.
But in September -- after
Cheney asserted in a televised interview that
Iraq had been "the geographic base of the
terrorists who have had us under assault now for
many years, but most especially on 9/11" --
Bush said there was no evidence that Saddam's
government was connected to those attacks.
Cheney also said last week that
the United States has never been able to
"knock down" an uncorroborated Czech
report that 9/11 plot leader Mohammed Atta met
with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before
the attacks.
The 9/11 commission found no
evidence to support that allegation, Hamilton
said, but "We're open to evidence on
it."
Hamilton said there was no
evidence that Iraq had responded to any of al
Qaeda's requests for assistance from Iraq in the
1990s, but they had "a very difficult,
complex relationship."
"At one point, Osama bin
Laden was actually supporting anti-Saddam
Islamists in Iraq, and then he evolved in a
different direction. So it's not easy to sort
out," he said.
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