NOW THIS IS INTERESTING:

WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. forces have arrested the Iraqi diplomat alleged by some Czech officials to have met with the lead Sept. 11 hijacker five months before the attacks.

U.S. government officials said Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was arrested on July 2. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said al-Ani had been interrogated but had provided little information.

The arrest was first reported Thursday by CBS News. U.S. investigators have dismissed Czech accounts of an April 2001 meeting in Prague between suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta and al-Ani, who is widely believed to be an intelligence agent.

Some Czech officials stand by their claims, the only known link between Saddam Hussein’s government and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Atta and al-Ani met,” Czech U.N. Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek said a year ago in an interview with The Associated Press.

Two points: (1) We keep rolling these guys up, one by one; and (2) If the Bush Administration had been deliberately hyping intelligence on Iraq, why did it go out of its way to step on the reports of the Atta meeting, which seem reasonably credible to me? I’m not convinced yet that they aren’t true — and certainly there was plenty of evidence to go with had the Bush Administration been engaged in the campaign of deception that its critics keep charging it with.