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Dick Cheney: Iraq Documents Show Saddam-Osama Tie

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Vice President Dick Cheney predicted Wednesday that thousands of boxes of documents captured from Saddam's Hussein's former regime will show that the Iraqi dictator had a much closer relationship with Osama bin Laden than was previously known.

"I think what we'll find as we get a chance to go through and analyze these documents -- there's some 50,000 boxes of them that are now being made available here over the next few months -- that we'll see a pretty complete picture that Saddam Hussein did, in fact, deal with some pretty nefarious characters out there," Cheney told Fox News Radio's Tony Snow.

Asked if he was referring to Osama bin Laden, Cheney replied:

"Yes, we don't know the full scale of it there yet, and I don't want to make a hard and fast prediction here. But there is reporting, obviously, that we've seen over the years that there was some kind of a relationship there between the Iraqis and Osama bin Laden."

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  An Iraqi intelligence document ordered released by the White House two weeks ago detailed a Feb. 1995 meeting between bin Laden and an Iraqi intelligence official that was personally approved by Saddam, where bin Laden requested help in conducting "joint operations" against U.S. forces then stationed in Saudi Arabia.

The document went on to note that Saddam agreed to help bin Laden with propaganda broadcasts into Saudi Arabia and that "the development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties [would] be left according to what's open based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation."

The vice president stressed that nothing in the new documents uncovered so far links Saddam to the 9/11 attacks. But he added: "That's a separate proposition from the question of whether or not there was some kind of a relationship between the Iraqi government, Iraqi intelligence services and the al Qaida organization."

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Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Al-Qaeda
Bush Administration
Iraq
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