Reply #10: Dick Cheney, Liar Extraordinaire... [View All]

[Evil_Dewers]

He then revived the possibility that Mohamed Atta, who led the Sept. 11 attacks, allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Baghdad five months before the attack. It is a story Cheney had repeated during a March 16 appearance on "Meet the Press" and one that his aides tried to have added to Powell's presentation in February at the United Nations.

"We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it," Cheney said yesterday. "We just don't know."

An FBI investigation concluded that Atta was apparently in Florida at the time of the alleged meeting, and the CIA has always doubted it took place. Czech authorities, who first mentioned the alleged meeting in October 2001 to U.S. officials, have since said they no longer are certain the individual in the video of the supposed meeting was Atta. Meanwhile, in July, the U.S. military captured the Iraqi intelligence officer who was supposed to have met Atta and has not obtained confirmation from him.

Cheney also seemed to broaden the intelligence on other alleged al Qaeda connections with Hussein, saying, "The Iraqi government or the Iraqi intelligence service had a relationship with al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s." Up to now, administration officials and CIA documents have said there had been eight meetings, primarily in the early 1990s, when bin Laden was in Sudan.

Cheney was less forthcoming when asked about Saudi Arabia's ties to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 hijackers. "I don't want to speculate," he said, adding that Sept. 11 is "over with now, it's done, it's history and we can put it behind us."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10734-2003Sep14.html