Cheney Says There Was No Iraq Link to 9/11 Terrorist Attacks

This comes as no shocker for the people paying attention to all of this all along, but what it does is prove there was no legitimate need to rush to invade Iraq. We already had the military campaign in Afghanistan going on and US-Coalition lives on the line. Bush and Cheney pulled troops out of Afghanistan to send them into Iraq needlessly. Years ago, NATO generals were screaming for help in Afghanistan as the Taliban began to regain territory. Aside from putting the lives of the troops on the line in Iraq, they further endangered the lives in Afghanistan.

Today we see the results of this farce from the Bush Administration. Today I posted how the claims backlogged in the VA system are over 900,000. We see a nation full of veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan needing help to heal their wounds at the same time their claims are tied up and they are not receiving income between the time they are discharged and the time the VA finally gets around to approving their claims for treatment and compensation. While it's great the time they are provided with free care has been extended, this does little to help them and their families pay their bills. This is one of the glaring, screaming facts about what Bush and Cheney did to the troops.

After the troops were sent into Afghanistan, there were less doctors and nurses working for the VA than there were following the Gulf War. They did not increase the budget or staffing. As a matter of fact, they cut the budget. Next came the push to invade Iraq. Cheney, having been Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War, had forgotten that when he was explaining the need to withdraw the troops from Iraq was so that they would not be "stuck in a quagmire" if they had taken control over Iraq. In other words, he knew full well what he was sending the troops into this time along with the fact there would be many, many wounded veterans needing care.

This is the most appalling aspect of the Bush Administration. It was not just the loss of lives paying the price for what they wanted to do, the Iraqi lives and the lives of the Coalition forces, but the lives of the veterans wounded in service to this nation under their orders. Bush and Cheney forgot that part of being "a war president" was their responsibility to the men and women serving under their command. They always seemed to mention the obligation of the troops but never quite seemed to understand their own obligation to the troops.

This report is just one more reminder of how callous Cheney was with the lives he had no problem sending into Iraq or the ones he had no problem abandoning in Afghanistan.

Cheney Says There Was No Iraq Link to 9/11 Terrorist Attacks

By James Rowley

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheney said reporting by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still the vice president said there had been a longstanding relationship between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion in 2003.

“I thought it was strong at the time and I still feel so today,” Cheney said at a National Press Club lunch today in Washington. “There was a relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. That’s not something I made up,” Cheney said, citing 2002 Senate testimony by George Tenet, then the CIA director. “We know for a fact that Saddam Hussein was a state sponsor of terrorism.”

On whether Hussein helped al-Qaeda carry out the 2001 terrorist attacks, Cheney said,

“I do not believe, and I have never seen any evidence, that he was involved in 9/11.”

Several months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said it was “pretty well” confirmed that Mohamed Atta, one of the leaders of the attack, had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2000, according to a Washington Post account. Cheney later said the meeting’s existence couldn’t be proven, the Post said.
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