Chariman of the September 11 Commission, Thomas Kean, says this...
The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission said Sunday that al Qaeda had much more interaction with Iran and Pakistan than it did with Iraq, underscoring a controversy over the Bush administration's insistence there was collaboration between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein.Thomas Kean made the comment even as he and other commissioners tried to steer clear of the debate over one of the administration's primary justifications for invading Iraq.
"We believe ... that there were a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq," said Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey.
"Al Qaeda didn't like to get involved with states, unless they were living there. They got involved with Sudan, they got involved ... where they lived, but otherwise no," he said on the Sunday morning talk show circuit.
But then Kean counters with this...
Kean said a commission staff document is an interim report and "we don't see any serious conflicts" with what the administration is saying.
Contacts, collaboration, whatever. It just doesn't make sense. BushCo made a strong effort to tie Iraq to the terrorists. They said Iraq was the biggest threat to America. But without uttering a word, the Iraq link to 9/11 was born. But consistently we get information that counters what BushCo was touting as proof Saddam was helping the terrorists at all. Here's the chain of events...
1. Al Qaeda is responsible for 9/11.
2. Iraq is accused of having ties to terrorists.
3. People believe, therefore, Iraq is tied to 9/11.
4. Iraq is labeled the biggest threat to America.
5. Bush and Cheney go around the country talking about Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda.
6. We go to war.
But everytime we get one of these reports that seems to contradict the Administration, and someone on the committee refutes that assertion, there are still some points worth discussiong that come out.
The commission's vice chairman, former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, said the White House and the commission agree on the central point: There is no evidence of a collaborative relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.Among the differences between what the White House has asserted and what the commission says it has found are:
-Cheney said Iraq deployed a bomb-making expert, a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service, when bin Laden asked for terror training. President Bush said on Feb. 8, 2003, that Iraq had provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. "The vice president, I believe, said that there was a response by Iraq to some of Osama bin Laden's requests. We found no evidence of that response," said Hamilton.
-Cheney said it's "never been proven" and "it's never been refuted" that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official on April 9, 2001 in Prague, Czech Republic. Hamilton said the commission has a picture of Atta taken in Virginia just a few days before the supposed meeting in Prague, as well as his cell phone records with calls placed in the United States at the time of the meeting. Hamilton noted that such data "is not conclusive proof" on Atta's whereabouts and Hamilton added that the vice president himself was saying the proof was not clear one way or the other.
You know how the old saying goes. Where there's smoke, there's fire.