 "Photo: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak")
WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 - disputing an idea held by many Americans.
''There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties,'' the president said. But he also said, ''We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11'' attacks. It was the administration's firmest assertion that there is no proven link between Saddam and Sept. 11.
The president's comment was in line with a statement Tuesday by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said he had not seen any evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks.
Yet, a new poll found that nearly 70 percent of respondents believed the Iraqi leader probably was personally involved. Rumsfeld said, ''I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that.''
The administration has argued that Saddam's government had close links to al-Qaida, the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden that masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Sunday, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney said that success in stabilizing and democratizing Iraq would strike a major blow at the ''the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9-11.''
And Tuesday, in an interview on ABC's ''Nightline,'' White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said that one of the reasons Bush went to war against Saddam was because he posed a threat in ''a region from which the 9-11 threat emerged.''
But Rice later added, ''We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein had either direction or control of 9-11."
In an appearance on NBC's ''Meet the Press,'' Cheney was asked whether he was surprised that Americans would believe that Iraq was behind the attacks.
''No, I think it's not surprising that people make that connection,'' he replied. Cheney also repeated an allegation - doubted by many in the intelligence community - that Mohamed Atta, the lead Sept. 11 attacker, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague five months before Sept. 11.
''We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it,'' Cheney said Sunday. However, other U.S. authorities have said information gathered on Atta's movement show he was on the U.S. East Coast when that meeting supposedly took place.
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