Thanx for the ping.
Have you ever come across any information about a meeting in Beirut, January 2001?
I bookmark this CNN article ages ago:
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/02/12/terror.meeting/
Andrea Koppel was covering the State Department at the time the piece was written, so I assume the unnamed officials she used as her source were in the State Department. It was written before 9/11, so it probably wasn't big news when it was written, but looking at it now it seems like it should have been huge news.
Yes, Iraq was holding meetings like that in Baghdad as well. The media has very selective memory about that stuff.