Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Transcript

Elton Beard has posted the transcript of the Bush exchange with John King.

JOHN KING: Mr. President, Dr. Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld both said yesterday that they could see no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with September 11th. Yet on Meet The Press on Sunday the vice president said that Iraq was the geographic base for the terrorists and he also said "I don't know", "we don't know" when asked if there was any involvement. Your critics say that this is some effort, deliberate effort to blur the line...
GEORGE W. BUSH (interjects): Yeah...

JOHN KING: ...to confuse people. How would you answer that?

GEORGE W. BUSH: No, we've had no evidence that Saddam was involved with the September the 11th... ...no, what the vice president said was that he has been involved with al-Qaeda, and Al Zaqarawi (ph), al-Qaeda operative, in Baghdad, he's the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat, he's a man still running loose, involved with the poisons network, involved with Ansar Al-Islam. There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties.



Cheney on MTP:

Now, is there a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in ’93? We know, as I say, that one of the perpetrators of that act did, in fact, receive support from the Iraqi government after the fact. 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 anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.