US President George W. Bush said on Wednesday that he had seen "no evidence" that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as the White House tried to correct an assertion that Vice President Dick Cheney left extremely murky on Sunday.
Cheney, on Meet the Press on NBC-TV, was asked about polls that showed that a majority of Americans believed that Saddam was involved in the attacks.
"I think it's not surprising that people make that connection," said Cheney, who leads the hawkish wing of Bush's administration.
Asked whether the connection exists, Cheney said, "We don't know."
He went on to describe Saddam's reported connections to al-Qaeda, connections that US intelligence analysts said were not very deep.
Bush, asked by a reporter on Wednesday about Cheney's statement, said, "No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," a far more definitive statement than the vice president's.
"Now, what the vice president said was is that he has been involved with al-Qaeda," Bush said.
"And al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a US diplomat," he said, a reference to the killing in October of Lawrence Foley on the doorstep of his home in Amman, Jordan.
Bush said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was "still running loose, involved with the poisons network," and said, "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties."
The White House has never said Saddam was part of the Sept. 11 plot, though from the moment of the attacks there was a search to determine whether he was connected.
Nonetheless, as Bush has described the invasion of Iraq as part of the war on terror, he has drawn a loose connection, saying that after Sept. 11, 2001, the US could no longer tolerate the kind of threat that he said Saddam posed, or risk that Saddam's weapons could be put in the hands of terrorists.
Cheney has gone the farthest in publicly discussing possible connections, and he noted on Sunday that "one of the perpetrators" of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 "did, in fact, receive support from the Iraqi government after the fact."
He repeated an accusation that a 9-11 hijacker "met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack," but added, "We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it."
Intelligence officials who have studied the question say there is no evidence of a meeting in Prague between any Sept. 11 plotter and Iraqi intelligence officials.
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