Cheney said in an interview on Fox News:
“On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that,” he told the Fox host. “There was “some reporting early on … but that was never borne out… [President] George [Bush] … did say and did testify that there was an ongoing relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but no proof that Iraq was involved in 9-11.”
How important is Cheney's admission?
Well, 5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam".
He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case." In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda".
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Moreover, President Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this and this.
And while many people now focus on the false WMD claims, it is important to remember that - at the time - the Saddam-911 link was at least as important in many people's minds as a reason to invade Iraq.
Indeed, given that Cheney and the boys are still pretending that everyone thought that Iraq possessed WMDs, Cheney's admission that there was never any evidence linking Iraq and 9/11 might be even more definitive proof of intentional misrepresentations by Cheney and other high-level members of the Bush administration.
Given that the anthrax attacks were also blamed on Iraq by the Pentagon - but they turned out to be the work of an American scientist - and given that it is now accepted by the 9/11 Commission itself as well as high-level military leaders, intelligence officials and others that the government's version of 9/11 is false, additional questions also arise.
