Chimpolini: I was VERY CAREFUL never to say Saddam ordered attacks...

Bush: No Iraq link to 9/11 found
President says Saddam had ties to al-Qaida, but apparently not to attacks
Thursday, September 18, 2003

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, having repeatedly linked Saddam Hussein to the terrorist organization behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said yesterday there is no evidence that the deposed Iraqi leader had a hand in those attacks, in contrast to the belief of most Americans.

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Publicly, at least, Bush has not explicitly blamed the attacks on Saddam. In speech after speech, however, the president has strongly linked Saddam and al-Qaida, the terrorist organization of bin Laden, the renegade Saudi whose followers hijacked jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.

In his May 1 declaration of military victory in Iraq from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, Bush said, "We have removed an ally of al-Qaida and cut off a source of terrorist funding." He also said, "The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror."

Two months earlier, in a speech aimed at mustering public support for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, Bush said, "The attacks of September 11th, 2001, showed what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/140133_bushiraq18.html

Experts Believed No Iraqi WMDs in 2001

A conference of top-level military analysts was told Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- a message that later fell on deaf ears in the American capital, analysts say.

Former Canadian military officer-turned-analyst, Sunil Ram remembers the January 2001 conference Understanding the Lessons of Nuclear Inspections and Monitoring in Iraq: A Ten-Year Review.

What he heard at the meeting he has repeated for months, he says, getting little attention from the mainstream media: that U.S. President George W. Bush had no grounds to base the invasion of Iraq on the disarmament issue.

"The people doing the presentation were weapons inspectors and former weapons inspectors and senior members of (U.S. government) agencies," Ram said in an interview.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/justify/2003/0718experts.htm

2001: Powell & Rice Declare Iraq Has No WMD and Is Not a Threat

In February 2003, Powell said: "We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."

But two years earlier, Powell said just the opposite. The occasion was a press conference on 24 February 2001 during Powell's visit to Cairo, Egypt. Answering a question about the US-led sanctions against Iraq, the Secretary of State said:

"We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq..."

http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/powell-no-wmd.htm