Cheney: No link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he does not believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning or execution of the September 11, 2001, attacks.


Former Vice President Dick Cheney says Saddam Hussein "provided sanctuary ... and resources to terrorists."

He strongly defended the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq, however, arguing that Hussein's previous support for known terrorists was a serious danger after 9/11.

Read More

Now I wonder how this is going to be spun by Rush and the other republican talking heads? So many of them have failed to acknowledge this little tidbit to their followers. I'm sure they'll come up with something really juicy that is a lot easier to swallow. The intelligence has been saying this for years. I wonder why Cheney has decided to finally open his mouth about it? I would have respected him and Bush a lot more of they had of just been honest about their mistakes 5 years ago but they wait until they are out of the whitehouse and have driven this country into the ground financially before they tell us what most of us already knew.

This was a huge problem for me back in the day. WAY too many uninformed will tell you that we went to Iraq because they attacked us on 9/11.

I agree with Cheney. Hussein was not involved in planning the actual attack in my opinion also.. But any one who believes that Hussein did not aid, abet and provide terrorist bent on doing us harm with anything needed is living in a dream world... Spin it any way you like...

Annie Oakley wrote:

This was a huge problem for me back in the day. WAY too many uninformed will tell you that we went to Iraq because they attacked us on 9/11.

So very true. And there are evil dictators all over the place who would like to see our country blown off the face of the earth but they picked Saddam Hussein because it was personal and there was tons of money to be made. We put him in power. Rumsfeld hung out with him. (Makes me think about how people flip about Obama shaking Chavez's hand but it's ok for Rumsfeld to have been buddies with Saddam). Bush Jr. wanted to finish what his daddy couldn't and 9-11 was his golden opportunity to do so. Look at the threat that North Korea has been posing all these years but for some reason that was totally ignored. I have always believed that this was about the oil and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove using the attack as an excuse to go after it. And when I hear people say that Saddam was helping Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist and blah blah, I just about smack myself in the forehead. Most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and were protected by their government. Did we go after them? OH NO. Because we need to be their friends no matter what. Heck, we used our own military to fly the Bin Laden family out of our country for their own safety. Doesn't that seem just a little odd to anyone? The country that should have been cleaned out was Afghanistan but we dropped the ball because Bush Co. had so much money invested in occupying Iraq. Now Afghanistan is a quagmire and Iraq has been turned into a terrorist breeding ground because we attacked them without just cause. When you blow up enough children, parents, grandparents, etc.. you are going to make people angry and they will hate you and want revenge. I agree that Saddam was horrible (maybe that's why Don liked him so much). I know this because of what he did to my stepfather but he wasn't the main problem. He had no weapons of mass destruction. That was just a big ole lie and everybody knows it. Now we've opened up the can of worms further and President Obama is left holding it. I honestly don't think there is enough damage control on earth to fix the things that have been done and we all know how good the memories are of those from the Middle East. We've lost thousands of troops because of a lie and it's sickening. Did we get revenge for 9-11? No, not in my opinion because we didn't go after the people who were actually behind it enough. We still don't have Osama and when Bush went on national TV and said he wasn't worried about him anymore my jaw dropped. So much for his big speech about not stopping until we capture him. Saddam Hussein was a scapegoat and I believe that if he was such a horrible threat to our country, the CIA could have had him knocked off in no time. Doesn't matter if it's legal or not, that's been proven with the torture and secret prisons. It could have been done and saved us a load of money and not turned thousands of more people against us in the process by destroying their country and killing their loved ones. But I guess there is no use crying over spilled milk. The best we can do is try to fix what we can and get the heck out of there.

Lucas McCain wrote:

I agree with Cheney. Hussein was not involved in planning the actual attack in my opinion also.. But any one who believes that Hussein did not aid, abet and provide terrorist bent on doing us harm with anything needed is living in a dream world... Spin it any way you like...

I agree and furthermore, anyone that thinks we weren't going to end up invading Iraq down the road, even if Gore would have been president, is kidding themselves.

Even Tenet testified to the strong relationship of Hussein with AlQaida..

Lucas McCain wrote:

Even Tenet testified to the strong relationship of Hussein with AlQaida..

Are you talking about the same Tenet who became friends with George W. Bush and didn't like to bring his boss/friend bad news so he built up a case that there was a strong connection between Iraq and al-Qaida when there just had a couple of hearsay stories that ended up being totally false. One of the connections was referred to as high up in the al-Qaida organization when he was actually a driver and was known to be mentally disturbed? Tenet seems to be a good person. Everyone who has known him seems to think that and he was very easy to like but he hasn't exactly had a great reputation at the CIA for staying on top of things.

Here's what Lawrence Wilkerson (Chief of Staff, State Department 02-05) says...

Quote :

A mystery to me. I spent some of the most intimate hours of my life with George Tenet and John McLaughlin his DDCI [deputy director of central intelligence]. ... [It's] a mystery to me in the sense that he could be so bamboozled by his own intelligence community and by foreign intelligence communities with whom he was dealing.

I have to go back and look at the record of the agency over which he presided. Let's face it: We missed the fall of the Soviet Union. We missed the 1998 nuclear test in India. We missed the five-year preparation cycle for 9/11. We bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. The CIA has not got a stellar record in the last decade or two. ... But George Tenet presided over this organization for quite a long time, and I sat in the room looking into his eyes, as did the secretary of state, and heard with the firmness that only George could give it -- and I don't mean terminology like "slam dunk," although he was a basketball aficionado and used that kind of terminology a lot, but I mean eyeball-to-eyeball contact between two of the most powerful [men] in the administration, Colin Powell and George Tenet -- and George Tenet assuring Colin Powell that the information he was presenting at the U.N. was ironclad, only to have that same individual call the secretary on more than one occasion in the ensuing months after the presentation and tell him that central pillars of his presentation were indeed false.

Now, do I believe George Tenet knew they were false when he told him that? Absolutely not. I just don't believe it. I refuse to believe it. How did we get to that point? How did our intelligence community get us to that point? How did [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Douglas Feith, who clearly politicized intelligence, clearly cherry-picked intelligence, clearly provided some of that cherry-picked intelligence to the vice president of the United State -- how did we combine all of that, plus a good dose of psychological groupthink, to come up with such an abysmal failure in regards to WMD in Iraq? It's a mystery to me, and I will never know the answer. ...

I think this guy got drunk with power and wanted to please his buddies so badly so he could be included in their very secretive world. If he didn't tell them what they wanted to hear, he would have been shut out. It's hard to say especially since Tenet himself has said he was pressured by Cheney to find a connection, any connection, so they could move forward with their plans. I think our national intelligence has been a complete failure for a while and when they allow emotion to come into play and actually fog their findings, it is no longer a viable,trustworthy organization. He really screwed up and once he made the "slam dunk" reference, the Bush administration had all they needed to start their war. He must not have realized just how bad it was going to get. You can't just go with your gut on such enormous issues that could potential destroy countries. And that's what he did and Cheney RAN with it. There was no imminent threat and this issue needed to be studied more before being acted on. Let the weapons inspectors, diplomats and experts on Iraq do their jobs. War should be the absolute LAST resort.


Here is a link to interviews with several people who know Tenet personally

Here's what Tyler Drumheller Chief CIA European Division says...

Quote :

... I think [Tenet] was truly dedicated to the idea of making an intelligence service. He's also, I think, dedicated to the institution of the CIA, and he wanted to make it better. ... I don't think he was ever completely comfortable with the Directorate of Operations [DO], because we cause problems for people. I think his staff tended to be analysts and people who came from the Hill.

But we had regular contact with him ourselves, and we could talk with him directly. You didn't have to go through one of these staffers. He was very dynamic. A lot of the things that we did in Europe in the war on terror -- we did some very good things with Europeans, and it was largely because I was able to call on him to sit down and talk to the leaders of these countries. ...

... The night before the speech [Colin Powell's UN Speech], that's this famous phone call from Tenet. In fact, it's funny. After many years of friendship with Tenet, [it's] one thing I really think stressed our relationship, but the fact is that phone call was meaningless, because at that point the speech was written. They were already in New York; they were going to give it the next day. But I called to give the phone number of the European service chief, and while I had him on the phone, I said: "Boss, ... there's a lot of problems with that German reporting. You know that?" And he said, "Yeah, don't worry about it; we've got it." So I said, "OK, done," and I went to bed confident that they had taken it out. ...

... It seemed to me ... he was trying to do the right thing. ... At that point, they had already decided that to attack and everything by the end of January, so there was tremendous pressure, and almost a fear, that something was going to happen to derail the attack. I think he just got sucked right along with it. He, in the end, was the guy that pushed the hardest trying to figure out if Curveball was fabricating. ...

What do you mean he pushed the hardest?

He's the one that said, "We have to get to the bottom of this," after the fact, after the speech. "We have to find out the truth about this." He very easily could have covered it up.

But before the speech?

Before the speech, they let it play out among the divisions. All they had to do was say, "We made a mistake." ... But I guess that's hard to say when the war started. ...

You know him. What was going on with him at that time?

I think he was just caught up in it. I think they were tired; they were all working around the clock. It's intoxicating to be around the president, to be in power. ... But I do think there was just incredible momentum, just a huge force, an irresistible force, for the war coming in. ... It's Washington; it's the way it happens in government. When things start building towards war, when there's all this emotion, you do things that you wouldn't have done if you sat down and thought about it. After the fact, like I say, he's the one that pushed very, very hard. He said, "We have to determine if this was real or not."

Why?

Because I think he really had to know; he wanted to know if it was real. ...

... I really do like the guy. I admire the guy; I really do. But again, as you said, there's no way to get around it.

Around what?

Around [the fact that] if they had these doubts, they should have told the president. You know, I wish he'd come out and say it, because knowing him, I can't believe he didn't [say anything], because that would be his nature. But I wasn't there, so I don't know. That's the other part of the equation: Only George was there. To have a debate within the service, that's not unusual; that's part of what intelligence work is. ... It should have been figured in, and George is the one who should have done it. Or if it was done and it was ignored, then that's a different issue. But that I don't know. Again, that's the murky part of it.

^ So does that mean Tenet lied under oath.. The strongest evidence of the Al-Qaida-Hussein connection was actually discovered during the war when the Al-Qaida training camps and videos were found.. Haven't found the time line yet so I can't say for fact, but Tenet's hearings were after the war started and that was the evidence he testified to be true..

[
: Most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and were protected by their government. Did we go after them? OH NO. Because we need to be their friends no matter what. Heck, we used our own military to fly the Bin Laden family out of our country for their own safety. Doesn't that seem just a little odd to anyone?
Obama agrees with the Saudis also.. http://www.allgov.com/ViewNews/Obama_Sides_with_Saudi_Royals_against_US_Families_in_911_Lawsuit_90602