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By Root 637 0

never actually claimed that Iraq and 9/11 were linked. This isn’t true. Cheney had told a credulous Tim Russert on Meet the Press that it was “pretty well confirmed” that Mohammad Atta, 9/11’s lead hijacker, “did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.” Cheney’s claim was quite the bombshell, and was widely reported at the time. In yet another Meet the Press appearance, Cheney told a wide-eyed Russert what success in Iraq would mean: “We will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”

Bush made it official. In his letter to Congress on the eve of the war, he concluded that attacking Iraq was “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.”

So Bush and Cheney did explicitly link Iraq to 9/11 on several occasions, especially when speaking to the naive Russert. But most of the time, they took great pains to imply it without coming out and saying it. They knew the public would make the link for themselves. And if the public was too slow, their jackals in the right-wing press would connect the dots for them. So the implication was all they needed. Every time the Bushies talked about Iraq, they talked about the lessons of September 11. The Christian Science Monitor wrote on March 14:

In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.

How many times did he mention Osama bin Laden in the same press conference? Zero times. In fact, during the whole of 2003, George W. Bush publicly mentioned Osama bin Laden four times. Every time in direct response to a question about Osama bin Laden.

The truth is that Iraq wasn’t just not involved in 9/11. Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda weren’t working together at all.

Although these two villainous gangs of goons had, in fact, met a few times to compare notes, they had abandoned any hopes of collaborative evildoing when they realized that their aims were in “ideological conflict.” That quote is from a top secret British intelligence memo that was leaked to the BBC in early February 2003, just in the nick of time to stop the march to a disastrous war.

News of the memo, which concluded that there were no current links between Saddam’s regime and the al Qaeda network, made headlines around the world—headlines like “No Link Between Iraq Regime and al Qaeda,” which appeared in the Press Trust of India on February 5, 2003. And “No Iraq-Osama Link” in Australia’s Gold Coast Bulletin, and “Experts Scorn Saddam Link to al Qaeda” in The Scotsman, a paper published by a man in Scotland, and “British Intelligence Report Rejects Current Iraq–al Qaeda Link” in the Chinese Xinhua Newswire.

It also made the news here in the United States. The memo was mentioned in the Village Voice and in the LA Weekly, which many have called the Village Voice of Los Angeles. The mainstream press covered it, too. On February 5, you’ll remember, Colin Powell told the United Nations, “Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible.”3 The next day, Congressman Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought up the leaked memo on CNN’s Crossfire, although Tucker Carlson blew past it, no doubt to move on to something more important. The Washington Post mentioned it in the last two paragraphs of a page 15 story on February 8 in its widely unread Saturday edition. Not only that, but the BBC’s Gordon Corera mentioned it in passing in a brief appearance on the February 6 Today Show to explain why Brits “just aren’t