You said "Dick Cheney said emphatically that Iraq and al Qaeda had an ongoing relationship"
and the MSNBC article has Cheney saying "that Saddam had "long-established ties" with al-Qaida."
Do you see any differences between these two statements?
Isn't Cheney being truthful when he apparently says there are "long-established ties"?
According to your linked MSNBC article "The report said that bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Saddam at the urging of allies in Sudan eager to protect their own ties to Iraq, even though the al-Qaida leader had previously provided support for “anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan.”
That indicates to me that there were "ties" between bin Laden and Saddam, just because they may not have reached some particular deal does not mean there were no ties- unless you imagine that there was no face to face meetings of any kind whatsoever and Saddam and bin Laden were merely disinterested pen pals.

How about an example sentence: CNN had "long-established ties" with Saddam regime, CNN feared it would damage these ties if it printed stories which Saddam strongly objected to.

I said: "Btw, do you think that the US has an "ongoing relationship" with say, N Korea or say, Iran."

Robert says: "Interesting tangent to take. Are you now saying that what Cheney and his cohorts actually meant was that Iraq and al Qaeda have a "negative relationship" in the sense of being adversaries?"

No I was merely hoping that you weren't confusing "ongoing relationship" with some kind of love affair. Relationship in this context is a neutral term and "ongoing" merely is saying that there is duration to the relationship- and usually implies the relationship currently active- rather merely some passing in the night event with no follow through. For example if a diplomat were to say we no longer had a "ongoing relationship" with N Korea, that would a polite way saying that all talks had ceased with no reasonable hope regaining a dialogue in the predictable future [in other words, the shit has hit the fan].