Newsday: CIA: No Iraqi officer link in al-Qaida meeting: White House official denies commissioner's statement that tied Fedayeen unit to al-Qaida

"The CIA concluded "a long time ago" that an al-Qaida associate who met with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia was not an officer in Saddam Hussein's army, as alleged Sunday by a Republican member of the 9/11 commission.
Commissioner John Lehman, who was Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan, said "new ... documents" indicated that "at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen," an elite army unit, "was a very prominent member of al-Qaida."
Lehman's remarks on NBC's "Meet the Press" lent support to the Bush administration's insistence that there were strong ties between Hussein and al-Qaida.
The administration official said the CIA and U.S. Army obtained the lists of members of the Fedayeen shortly after the invasion of Iraq last year. Some, he said, had names "similar to" Ahmad Hikmat Shakir. But, he said, the CIA had concluded "a long time ago" that none were the al-Qaida associate. He would not say whether the al-Qaida associate is in U.S. custody. Other sources said he was not.
A report last week by the 10-member commission concluded that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden had "explored possible cooperation" with Iraq and that there had been contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, but that these did not result in a "collaborative relationship."
Lehman said that, since the report was issued, new intelligence had arrived "from the interrogations in Guantanamo and Iraq and from captured documents. ... Some of these documents indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al-Qaida."
His comments were made after Vice President Dick Cheney, the administration's strongest advocate of an alleged link between Hussein and al-Qaida, said in an interview Friday that he, Cheney, "probably" saw intelligence not reviewed by the Sept. 11 commission.
In alleging that a Hussein army officer was an al-Qaida operative, Lehman also acknowledged that the claim "still has not been confirmed" by the commission. But he insisted that Cheney "was right when he said he may have things we [the commission] don't have yet."
An administration official familiar with the CIA intelligence on the matter identified the al-Qaida associate who met with hijackers Khalid al Midhar and Nawar al Hazmi in Kula Lampur, Malaysia, in early 2000 as Ahmad Hikmat Shakir al-Azzawi. Some of the early planning for Sept. 11 allegedly occurred at the meeting.
Lehman could not be reached for comment. Commission spokesman Jonathan Stull said the commission staff was looking into the allegations and, if deemed credible, they would be included in the final report to be released in July.
The claim that the Iraqi officer and al-Qaida figure are the same first appeared in a Wall Street Journal editorial on May 27. A similar account was then published in the June 7 edition of the Weekly Standard, which reported that the link was discovered by an analyst working for a controversial Pentagon intelligence unit under Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy."