Please show me a link that says that.
Saying Saddam has been known to associate with Al Qaeda leaders is not the same as saying they are friends. The lying left media will twist stuff like this, then claim it is false. It is the left that is lying, by improperly framing a connection.
Again, please show me a quote, and in context, that makes the claim Saddam was friends with Al Qaeda.
"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 was "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.)
Intelligence community claims and doubts
In the initial stages of the war on terror, the Central Intelligence Agency, under George Tenet, was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with President Bush that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, V.P. Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the CIA and Tenet. The questionable intelligence acquired by this secret program was "stovepiped" to the vice president and presented to the public. In some cases, Cheney’s office would leak the intelligence to reporters, where it would be reported by outlets such as The New York Times. Cheney would subsequently appear on the Sunday political television talk shows to discuss the intelligence, referencing The New York Times as the source to give it credence.[18]
The prewar CIA testimony was that there was evidence of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade involving Iraq providing al-Qaeda with various kinds of training-combat, bomb-making, and [chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear] CBRN, but that they had no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaeda strike.[19][20] The CIA's report on Iraq's ties to terrorism noted in September 2002 that the CIA did not have "credible intelligence reporting" of operational collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda. According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the CIA reported that "al-Qaida, including Bin Ladin personally, and Saddam were leery of close cooperation," but that the "mutual antipathy of the two would not prevent tactical, limited cooperation." (p. 338) The current consensus view of experts is that although members of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service may have met with al-Qaeda terrorists over the last decade or so, that there was no evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda were linked operationally.[21] It is now known that the main source for the CIA's claim that Iraq had trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases included the now recanted claims of captured al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The CIA has since recalled and reissued all its intelligence reporting about al-Libi’s recanted claims.[22] Likewise, the DIA communicated to President Bush in February 2002 its stance that al-Libi "was intentionally misleading his debriefers."[23]
9/11 Commission conclusions
In the summer of 2004, the 9/11 Commission concluded that "to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States."[24][25][26]
14 "The Vice President Appears on NBC's Meet the Press". White House news release (Press release). The White House. 2001-12-09.
15 "Transcript for Sept. 14 - Meet the Press", MSNBC.
16 Landay, Jonathan S.; Warren P. Strobel, John Walcott (March 3, 2004). "Doubts Cast on Efforts to Link Saddam, al-Qaida". Knight-Ridder.
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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