Weekly Standard: Cheney V. Powell - The vice president and the secretary of State appear to have conflicting opinions of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection. But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

"That was Secretary of State Colin Powell last Thursday. It was a curious comment, given that the administration had made an Iraq-al Qaeda connection an important, if ancillary, part of its case for war in Iraq. In fact, Powell himself had laid out some of the "concrete evidence" of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection himself in a presentation at the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003."

"[in February 2003]...Powell was emphatic. "It's not that we are trying to find a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq. It's there. It's not something we're making up--it's there and we can't fail to take note of it or to talk about it or report it."

"[Cheney:] "I can give you a few quick for instances [of a general link between Al Qaida and Iraq] --one, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The main perpetrator was a man named Ramzi Yousef. He's now in prison in Colorado. His sidekick in the exercise was a man named Abdul Rahman Yasin . . . Ahman Rahman . . . Yasin is his last name anyway. I can't remember his earlier first names. He fled the United States after the attack, the 1993 attack, went to Iraq, and we know now based on documents that we've captured since we took Baghdad, that they put him on the payroll, gave him a monthly stipend and provided him with a house, sanctuary, in effect, in Iraq, in the aftermath of nine-ele . . . (sic) . . . the 93' attack on the World Trade Center."

"And you can look at Zarkawi, (Abu Mussab) al-Zarkawi, who is still out there operating today, who was an al-Qaida associate, who was wounded in Afghanistan, took refuge in Baghdad, working out of Baghdad, worked with the Ansar al Islam group up in northeastern Iraq, that produced a so-called poison factory, a group that we hit when we went into Iraq. They were involved in trying to smuggle things, manufacture and smuggle things like ricin into Europe to attack various targets in Europe with. He also, Zarkawi, was responsible for the assassination of a man named Foley, who worked for A.I.D. in Amman, Jordan, an American assigned over there."

"The links go back. We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it. A lot of it has been declassified. More, I'm sure, will be declassified in the future, and my expectation would be as we get the time. We haven't really had the time yet to pore through all those records in Baghdad. We'll find ample evidence confirming the link--that is the connection, if you will, between al Qaida and the Iraqi intelligence services. They have worked together on a number of occasions."