The qoute "we knew that Mohammad Atta had met with the Iraqis in Prague" does not appear in this thread.

What does appear is "we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official"

This is very much the same sort of thing Clinton has been so thoroughly criticized for when he said "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is".

It's all about plausible deniability. Don't come right out and say it, but word things in such a way that people get a certain impression in their minds. You can deny you were trying to do it, and you still get the results you were after (convincing people of something that is not true). The proof is in the pudding - in this case, the number of people who held false beliefs about Saddam being all or partly responsible for 9/11.