This is from Slate magazine:
In the case of the 9/11, I accept your point that the purported meeting between Iraqi consul al-Ani and Mohammed Atta in Prague is open to question. All evidence, and especially that evidence produced in the murky world of intelligence-gathering, can be controverted: Otherwise, it would not be evidence but an article of faith. But it is untrue that the Czech government has discredited the report about this meeting. You say: "President Vaclav Havel, no less, had to walk it back. Jim Risen has written about this in the New York Times." Risen wrote (New York Times, October 21, 2001) that Havel told the White House in a phone call that there was no evidence to confirm the Atta/al-Ani meeting, but that's erroneous. Immediately after the story appeared, Havel not only denied he had ever communicated the information to the White House, but he also said, through his spokesman, that the New York Times story was "a fabrication," and "nothing like this has occurred." Unfortunately, the Times' error-correction policy (which is brilliantly elucidated by Renata Adler in her book Canaries in the Mine Shaft) remedies misspelling and inaccurate photo-captions, but not errors of substance. So, the Times never reported that its own authority for its exclusive story, Havel, had said it was a fabrication.
In fact, over the past 18 months, and as recently as last week (when it expelled additional Iraqi diplomats), the Czech government, through the statements of its intelligence chief Jiri Ruzek, its Interior Minister Stanislav Gross, and its U.N. Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek (who served the expulsion notice on al-Ani), has confirmed that it has credible intelligence about the meeting.
I am intrigued by your "intelligence community sources" who express doubts about the reliability of the Czech intelligence (perhaps they, like you, were unaware that the Times story had been an invention). Have you considered the possibility that the CIA may have an interest in not opening this particular can of worms, especially given its delicate chronology? The reported meeting, and the expulsion of Iraq consul al-Ani, happened on its watch: April 2001. The agency couldn't be unaware of it.
Never before had the Czech Republic expelled such a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat. The CIA maintained a liaison with the Czechs. Prime Minister Milos Zeman said that Czech intelligence assumed that the meeting between al-Ani and Atta concerned the plot to blow up the American target Radio Free Europe—not the World Trade Center. Czech intelligence and British intelligence (through an Iraqi defector, who was in fact al-Ani's predecessor in Prague) had information about such a plan, targeting the Radio Free Europe building. It seems unlikely that this information was not passed on, by both British and Czech intelligence, to the CIA. The CIA would have had this information in their files. What did they do about it? Did they pass it on to the FBI?
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