On the November 14 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, congressional correspondent Brian Wilson falsely stated that Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) “has accused the president of claiming that Saddam [Hussein] trained the 9-11 hijackers.” In fact, Levin accused President Bush of suggesting that Hussein “trained Al Qaeda in the use of chemical and biological weapons” -- which Bush did in fact say in 2002 and 2003, despite contrary intelligence from the Pentagon.

Wilson's report was focused on a November 14 press conference held by Levin, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL), so Wilson was apparently mischaracterizing comments Levin made that day. In that press conference, Levin said:

LEVIN: The intelligence community did not support the president on the key issue of whether or not Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were allies. That's the sale that the administration made to the American people. And the American people came to believe before the war, according to all the polls, that Saddam Hussein actually had participated in the attack on us.

And the reason that they reached that belief and the reason it was so important to the administration that they mislead the American people to believing that is that it wasn't just the belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction; it was the repeated statement of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, that Saddam Hussein would give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda and, in fact, that Saddam Hussein had trained Al Qaeda in the use of biological and chemical weapons.

That's what the administration -- that's what the president of the United States said: Saddam Hussein trained Al Qaeda in the use of chemical and biological weapons. The intelligence community said, “That's not what we believe.”

At no point did Levin accuse Bush of “claiming that Saddam trained the 9-11 hijackers,” as Wilson alleged. Further, Media Matters for America has found no evidence of Levin ever making such a claim. In fact, in an October 22, 2004, report examining claims of a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Levin stated that “most senior Administration officials did not explicitly claim that Iraq had been involved in the 9/11 attacks,” though, he noted, some did suggest collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda. In that report, Levin pointed to Vice President Dick Cheney and then-undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas J. Feith -- not Bush -- as the administration officials who came closest to alleging collaboration:

Although most senior Administration officials did not explicitly claim that Iraq had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, they failed to reflect the IC's [intelligence community] judgment that there was no credible evidence of collaboration. Vice President Cheney has consistently gone beyond or ignored the IC's assessment that, as the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] states, the alleged meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an IIS officer in Prague in April 2001 likely never occurred.39 Even when explicitly asked in September 2002 if the CIA believed the report was credible, the Vice President responded that the report was “credible,” even though the SSCI report indicates that the CIA's view that the meeting had likely not taken place could be traced back to at least June 2002. As late as June 17, 2004, Vice President Cheney was stating that the United States had not been able to prove or disprove the Czech “claim” that the Atta meeting took place (one unsubstantiated report not believed by the CIA was still being described by Vice President Cheney as “the Czech claim,” and that “we've never been able to confirm it or to knock it down”).

In that same interview, the Vice President went on to say, regarding the larger question of an Iraqi connection to or responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, “I have never seen evidence that supports that except for this one report from the Czechs,” thus leaving the erroneous impression that it was still an open question in the view of the IC.

Vice President Cheney's statements were, however, consistent with the views put forth by Feith's policy office, whose briefing cited the Atta meeting as one of the “known Iraq-al Qaeda contacts.” And, again, Vice President Cheney specifically stated that the Feith assessment on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda was the “best source of information.”

A review of Bush's prewar statements about Iraq validates the assertion Levin actually did make on November 14 -- that Bush claimed before the war that Hussein had provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training. As Newsweek investigative correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball noted in a November 10 “Web Exclusive” article, Bush declared in an October 7, 2002, speech: “We've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” Isikoff and Hosenball similarly noted that on February 6, 2003, Bush said, “Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.”

Bush's statements were apparently based on intelligence obtained from a senior Al Qaeda operative whose reliability was doubted by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at the time -- as a document released by Levin's office revealed -- and who has since recanted his allegations.

From the November 14 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:

WILSON: Levin has also accused the president of claiming that Saddam trained the 9-11 hijackers, but when asked in January 2003 if he knew of any connection between Saddam and the 9-11 hijackers, President Bush stated flatly, “I can't make that claim.”