From the Transcript:
CHENEY: The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there?s a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but there?s clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror.
Ahem, from the Meet the Press interview:
Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said that Cheney’s “willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It’s astounding.”
In particular, current intelligence officials reiterated yesterday that a reported Prague visit in April 2001 between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent had been discounted by the CIA, which sent former agency Director James R. Woolsey to investigate the claim. Woolsey did not find any evidence to confirm the report, officials said, and President Bush did not include it in the case for war in his State of the Union address last January.
But Cheney, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” cited the report of the meeting as possible evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link and said it was neither confirmed nor discredited, saying
: “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.”
For those playing at home, that’s a BIG LIE.