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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (191101)	6/20/2004 8:48:48 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574122

<font color=brown> Hamilton has said that if Cheney disagrees with the Commission's findings and he has evidence to support his position, then he needs to provide that evidence to the Commission. I would like to tell the Commission not to hold their breath!<font color=black> ***************************************************** 9/11 Panel Chiefs Reiterate Position on Qaeda-Iraq Ties By CHRISTINE HAUSER Published: June 20, 2004 The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission reiterated today that they did not see any evidence of a collaborative relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and that this position did not differ from the view of the Bush administration. The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, appeared on the ABC News program "This Week" as two other commission members were interviewed on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" about initial findings of the commission. Its final report is scheduled to be released next month. Last week, a commission staff report was released that said there did not appear to be a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and the terrorist network, an observation that seemed to weaken one of the main justifications for the decision to invade Iraq last year and overthrow Mr. Hussein. Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton appeared to suggest that any differences over the issue were largely semantic. "We have concluded there is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States," Mr. Kean said. "What we do say, however, is there were contacts." Mr. Hamilton said he had looked at the statements "quite carefully" from the administration. "They are not claiming there was a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda with regard to the attacks on the United States," he said. He later added that with regard to the administration's core statements, "I don't think there is a difference of opinion with regard to those statements." On Friday, the commission leaders called on Vice President Dick Cheney to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Mr. Kean said today that while the administration still has materials that the commission needed to see, "up to this point we don't see any serious conflicts" between what the commission was saying and the position of the Bush administration. Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton have said that they wanted information to back Mr. Cheney's suggestion that one of the hijackers might have met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent, a meeting that the panel's staff believes did not take place. Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either. Richard Ben-Veniste, a commission member, said on NBC that the intelligence community had not used its collected information effectively. John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member, said the intelligence community was "dysfunctional" and that the commission would make recommendations for improvements. "They could not distinguish between a bicycle crash and a train wreck," he said. nytimes.com