Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Vice President.

BORGER: But you say you disagree with the commission...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: On this question of whether or not there was a general relationship.

BORGER: Yes.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Yeah.

BORGER: And they say that there was not one forged and you were saying yes, that there was. Do you know things that the commission does not know?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Probably.

BORGER: And do you think the commission needs to know them?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I don't have any--I don't know what they know. I do know they didn't talk with any original sources on this subject that say that in their report.

BORGER: They did talk with people who had interrogated sources.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Right.

BORGER: So they do have good sources.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Gloria, the notion that there is no relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida just simply is not true.

(snip)

BORGER: Let me just ask you, bottom line, though, on 9/11...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: On 9/11...

BORGER: ...Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: We have never been able to prove that there was a connection there on 9/11. The one thing we have is the Czech intelligence service report saying that Mohammad Atta had met with the senior Iraqi intelligence official at the embassy on April 9th, 2001. That's never been proven. It's never been refuted.

(snip)

BORGER: Let me ask you what your response is to the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, who said upon looking at this 9/11 report that this administration, quote, "misled America."

Vice Pres. CHENEY: In what respect? I haven't seen that.

BORGER: In terms of the relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: We never said that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. We never said that. You can't find any place where I said it, where the president said it. I was asked that, as a matter of fact, by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" on the Sunday after the attack and said, `No, we don't have any evidence of it.' Later on we received this information from the Czechs, but again, as I say, we've never been able to prove that nor have we been able to knock it down.

BORGER: Now the report says, though, that there isn't any relationship, so...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: They've concluded, based on what they've done.

BORGER: And you're not there.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: They've concluded and I haven't had a chance to read all of their report. They've concluded based on the work they've done that there was no connection, that Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. And I can't say they were. I've never seen evidence that supports that, except this one report from the Czechs.

(snip)

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Gloria, I don't feel persecuted. I don't need to. The fact of the matter is, the evidence is overwhelming. The press is, with all due respect, and there are exceptions, oftentimes lazy, oftentimes simply reports what somebody else in the press said without doing their homework.

BORGER: But it's the commission that reached--I mean, I know. I don't want to go back over the old ground here, but...

As you can see, Cheney's key argument is essentially that nobody has been able to prove conclusively that there wasn't a connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.

You know what this reminds me of? A little scenario that took place in connection with Rove's push polling campaign against McCain in 2000. Remember, when anonomous "polling" calls were made to South Carolinans, asking whether they would continue supporting McCain if they learned that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a black woman? (McCain has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh). They got some idiot from Bob Jones University to run around claiming that McCain actually had fathered a child with a black woman. The idiot was confronted on CNN, "Professor, you say that this man had children out of wedlock. He did not have children out of wedlock." Hand replied, "Wait a minute, that's a universal negative. Can you prove that there aren't any?"