US: The reclusive US vice President has hit back in a rare interview, defending his claim that there was a relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, writes Conor O'Clery in New York.
Mr Dick Cheney, his credibility under attack in the US media, also accused the New York Times of "outrageous" coverage of the 9/11 commission report on Wednesday that it found no credible evidence of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Mr Cheney, who said he disagreed with both the findings and the way they had been portrayed, admitted "we don't know" if Iraq was involved with al-Qaida in the attack on 9/11, as administration statements have hinted over the last two years.
"What the commission says is that they can't find any evidence of that," he said. "There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s.
"It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials. It involves a senior official, a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service going to the Sudan before bin Laden ever went to Afghanistan to train them in bomb-making, helping teach them how to forge documents.
"Mr Zarqawi, who's in Baghdad today, is an al-Qaida associate who took refuge in Baghdad, found sanctuary and safe harbor there before we ever launched into Iraq.
"There's a Mr Yasin, who was a World Trade Centre bomber in '93, who fled to Iraq after that and we found since when we got into Baghdad, documents showing that he was put on the payroll and given housing by Saddam Hussein after the '93 attack; in other words, provided safe harbor and sanctuary."
Mr Cheney singled out a four column headline in Thursday's New York Times saying "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie" for his charge that "what The New York Times did today was outrageous."
"The press wants to run out and say there's a fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said," he said.
The commission found no evidence to support the proposition that Iraq was involved in 9/11 he acknowledged, but "they did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida in other areas, in other ways."
Enlarging on his comments on the militant al-Zarqawi, who is thought to be behind several car bombings in Iraq, Mr Cheney said he had been described as an al-Qaida associate.
"He ran training camps in Afghanistan back before we went to war in Afghanistan. After we went in and hit his training camp, he fled to Baghdad. Found safe harbor and sanctuary in Baghdad in May of 2002.
"He arrived with about two dozen other supporters of his, members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was Zawahiri's organization. He's the number two to bin Laden, which was merged with al-Qaida interchangeably. Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaida, same-same. They're all now part of one organization."
On the question of whether Iraq was involved with 9/11, "the one thing we have is the Czech intelligence service report saying that (lead hijacker) Mohammad Atta had met with the senior Iraqi intelligence official at the embassy on April 9th, 2001. That's never been proven. It's never been refuted."
The 10-member commission investigating the attacks on the US said it did not believe the Prague meeting took place, as telephone records put Atta in the US at the time.
The New York Times, which has issued a self-criticism recently for its pre war stories hyping claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, pointed out in its report of Mr Cheney's interview that the White House said it did not see contradictions between the commission's findings and previous statements by Mr Bush and Mr Cheney.
It also said that President George Bush and Mr Cheney had been careful never to say there was a direct link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
Mr Bush yesterday linked the war in Iraq with 9/11, telling soldiers in Washington state:
"We will remove threats before they arrive, instead of waiting for the next attack, the next catastrophe. That is one of the lessons of September the 11th we must never forget. Saddam Hussein's regime posed a threat to the American people, and people around the world."