Bush never said Saddam was connected to 9/11.The main claim was that he had WMD's...as did the Clinton admin. Ties to AQ were way down on the list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegationsSeptember 11th aftermathThe Bush Administration sought to link the Iraqi dictator to Islamist radicals early on in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. President Bush allegedly made the case to Tony Blair as early as September 14, 2001, although Blair urged him not to pursue the claim.[12]
In addition, Bush received on 21 September 2001 a classified President's Daily Brief (PDB), indicating the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks and that "there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."[13]
[edit] Cheney's claimsVice President Dick Cheney had told Meet the Press on December 9, 2001, that Iraq was harboring Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,[14] and repeated the statement in another appearance on September 14, 2003, saying "We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaida sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaida organization. We know, for example, in connection with the original World Trade Center bombing in '93 that one of the bombers was Iraqi, returned to Iraq after the attack of '93. And we’ve learned subsequent to that, since we went into Baghdad and got into the intelligence files, that this individual probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven."[15] and once again in an interview with National Public Radio in January, 2004, stating that there was "overwhelming evidence" of a relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda based on evidence including Iraq's purported harboring of Yasin.[16]
