The US Sept. 11 Commission said Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney had no new information to support his claim that ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaida network had relations.

"After examining available transcripts of the vice president's public remarks, the 9-11 Commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq prior to the 9-11 attacks," the commission said in a statement.

In its final public hearing last month, the commission said in a staff report that al-Qaida had only limited contact with Iraq before the Sept. 11 terror attacks and that there was no evidence of collaborative links between Iraq and al-Qaida.

Cheney has asserted long-standing links between the former Iraqi regime and al-Qaida, which is blamed for the terrorist attacks that killed some 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001.

In an interview with CNBC, Cheney said that "the notion that there is no relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida just simply is not true," and suggested that there was information about Iraq's links to terrorists the commission members did not know.

Iraq's alleged ties with al-Qaida were a major justification that the Bush administration used for going to war with Iraq in 2003.

Cheney's spokesman Kevin Kellems denied any conflict between the commission's finding of no Saddam-al-Qaida relationship and the vice president's position. He described Cheney as being "pleased" about the commission's statement and said the message "put to rest a non-story."

Source: Xinhua