Vice President Dick Cheney had told
Meet the Press on December 9, 2001, that Iraq was harboring
Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
[14] and repeated the statement in another appearance on September 14, 2003, saying "We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaida sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaida organization. We know, for example, in connection with the original World Trade Center bombing in '93 that one of the bombers was Iraqi, returned to Iraq after the attack of '93. And we’ve learned subsequent to that, since we went into Baghdad and got into the intelligence files, that this individual probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven."
[15] and once again in an interview with
National Public Radio in January, 2004, stating that there had been "overwhelming evidence" of a relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda based on evidence including Iraq's purported harboring of Yasin.
[16]
In the same
Meet the Press interviews, Cheney implied a connection between Iraq and
Mohamed Atta; "The Czech interior minister said today that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 terrorists attacks on the United States, just five months before the synchronized hijackings and mass killings were carried out."
[14] and "With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know."
[15] Czech officials have since backed off of this claim, and even Cheney has since acknowledged that the notion "that the meeting ever took place" has been "pretty well knocked down now."
[17] (See
Mohamed Atta's alleged Prague connection.)