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Gotta love the NY Times:

Washington -- A former Iraqi intelligence officer who was said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told U.S. interrogators the meeting never happened, according to U.S. officials familiar with classified intelligence reports on the matter.

Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the former intelligence officer, was taken into custody by U.S. forces in July. Under questioning, he has said that he did not meet with Mohamed Atta in Prague, Czech Republic, according to the officials, who have reviewed classified debriefing reports based on the interrogations.

U.S. officials caution that Ani may have been lying to his interrogators, but the only other person reported to have attended the meeting was Atta, who died in the crash of his hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.

Anyone else notice the interesting description of how Atta met his maker? One would think the folks at a New York paper would use slightly stronger wording.

And I sure hope the following story doesn't ruin their euphoria, because although there may or may not have been a meeting in Prague the Telegraph has obtained new evidence of a meeting in Baghdad:

Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.

Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day "work programme" Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal's base in Baghdad.

In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta "displayed extraordinary effort" and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be "responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy".

Of course, we may never know, seeing as how Mo died in that tragic plane crash.

And if you think that's too good to be true then you won't care about this either:

The second part of the memo, which is headed "Niger Shipment", contains a report about an unspecified shipment - believed to be uranium - that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.