Cheney Offers Details of Hussein-Al Qaeda Link

Returning to the controversy over whether Saddam Hussein collaborated with Al Qaeda, Vice President Dick Cheney offered details today of what he described as long-standing, high-level cooperation between the former Iraqi dictator and the terrorist network.

Speaking hours after Hussein’s pretrial hearing in a Baghdad courtroom, Cheney accused the former dictator of sending a brigadier from the Iraqi intelligence service to Sudan in the early 1990s to train Al Qaeda bomb makers and forgers. Cheney said Iraq gave sanctuary to one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and, later, to senior Al Qaeda associate Abu Musab Zarqawi after coalition forces hit an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

“These ties included senior level contacts going back a decade,” he told a crowd of about 600 at the D-Day museum here in a speech intended to boost President Bush’s reelection campaign during a pivotal moment in Iraq.

Last month, the staff of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks issued a report that significantly played down such ties. The staff report said that Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime made overtures to each other in the early to mid 1990s before Osama bin Laden moved his fledgling operation from Sudan to Afghanistan. But it concluded, based on all available classified U.S. intelligence, that there were no “operational” ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

After Cheney, President Bush and other top administration officials contested the findings of the staff report, commission Chairman Thomas Kean urged the White House to forward to his staff any information that might support the administration’s claim. A commission spokesman was not immediately available today to say whether any new information had been provided.

The war has become a central theme of the campaign. Last week, Democrats latched on to the independent commission’s report. The study concluded that Hussein had not collaborated with Al Qaeda. Democrats have cited this finding as evidence that the White House misled the public by linking Hussein to Al Qaeda to justify the war with Iraq.

Cheney has come under particular criticism as one of the administration’s leading advocates for the invasion, publicly disagreeing with the tone of the commission’s report and with critics who say it proved that Iraq had no connection to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Cheney told one interviewer last week that he knew more than the commission about Iraq.

Responding to the vice president, a spokesman for Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, the speech reflected fears within the Bush campaign because Americans were losing confident in Bush’s conduct of the campaign against terrorism.

“The fact is that week after week after week, there’s a new story about the White House manipulating intelligence or angering crucial allies in the war on terror or spreading our military too thin,” said Phil Singer, a Kerry spokesman. “In the nine months before the September 11 attacks, this president didn’t have a single Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism. The facts speak for themselves and it’s time for the White House to take responsibility.”

Today’s speech underscored renewed efforts by the White House to rebuild support for its Iraq policies in the wake of the handover of sovereignty and as the president’s reelection campaign heads into its final months. Recent polls show the public growing increasingly concerned about U.S. casualties in Iraq and unconvinced that the war was worth the cost.

Cheney has been a favorite target of Democrats, who have tried to connect his office to a series of no-bid contracts in Iraq awarded to the company he once headed, Halliburton. Cheney has denied a link between his past employment and the contracts.

In addition to supporting Palestinian terrorists, Hussein in the early 1990s dispatched the intelligence official to Sudan to assist Al Qaeda in “bomb making and concurrent forgery,” Cheney said.

He added that Zarqawi was given refuge in Iraq and allowed to flourish.

“From the Iraqi capital in 2002, Zarqawi, along with at least two dozen other Al Qaeda members and associates, ran a poisons camp in northern Iraq, which became a safe haven for Ansar al-Islam as well as Al Qaeda terrorists fleeing the coalition in Afghanistan,” Cheney said. “The Iraqi regime refused to turn over Zarqawi even after twice being provided with detailed information on his presence in Baghdad.”

The speech offered a comprehensive defense of the administration’s approach to Iraq and the war on terrorism, at a time when Cheney is beginning to play a more prominent role in the presidential campaign. The vice president argued that he and Bush were forced to make up for the failures of the past.

Setting up a comparison with the Clinton administration, which he did not mention by name, Cheney said: “Consider for a moment how matters stood at the time when President Bush and I were sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2001. Terrorists were on the offensive around the world, emboldened by many years of unanswered attacks. Repeatedly, they had struck America with little cost or consequence.”

Cheney criticized the Clinton administration for failing to crack down on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for their lax response to the growing Al Qaeda threat within their own borders.

In January 2001, Cheney said, Pakistan was one of three countries that recognized the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. He said that Al Qaeda had a large presence there as well as in Afghanistan.

“A strong radical Islamic movement had taken root in Pakistan, and was recruiting thousands for terrorist networks,” Cheney said. “And the United States was not engaging Pakistan’s leaders or its military, whose support would be critical to any serious effort to shut down Al Qaeda’s Afghan operations.

“When we took office, terrorists were also receiving support in Saudi Arabia,” Cheney said. “Fundraisers and facilitators were providing money and logistical support to Al Qaeda.

“All that has changed. On assuming the presidency, George W. Bush set out to reverse these dangerous trends,” Cheney said.

Cheney did not back down from another point of contention: weapons of mass destruction. He and other administration officials have insisted that Hussein possessed them. None have been found.

But, Cheney said, the Bush administration’s pursuit of such weapons has proven effective.

“Iraq is no longer defying the U.N., pursuing weapons of mass destruction, providing safe haven for terrorists, or paying $25,000 rewards to suicide bombers,” he said. “Saddam Hussein is no longer tormenting the Iraqi people, or piling the bodies of innocent women and children into mass graves.”

Wallsten reported from New Orleans and Meyer from Washington.