[blogs] Dear Raed — blogging from Baghdad … ‘Powell speech is around 6pm in Baghdad, the whole family is getting together for tea and dates-pastry to watch the (Powell Rocks the UN) show. Not on Iraqi TV of course, we have decided to put up the satellite dish to watch it, yes we will put it away afterwards until the next event. I don’t exactly like the thought of two months in prison just to have 24 hour BBC…’ [thanks Pete]

[war] ‘Saddam, tell me about your mum’ — interview with the CIA psychiatrist who studied Saddam Hussein … ‘”It all goes back to his mother’s womb,” Post declares with some professional satisfaction. “During the mother’s pregnancy with Saddam Hussein, his father died, and another son died when he was only 12 years old. She both tried to commit suicide and to have an abortion.” As the story goes, Saddam’s mother, Subha, was prevented from killing herself and her unborn child by a compassionate family of Iraqi Jews. That family is now reported to be living in Israel, where it may think itself the tool of some huge cosmic joke.’

[politics] Saddam and Me — interview with George Galloway …

‘He revealed how Saddam had offered him Quality Street chocolates, told him how much he admired British buses. He also said how shy and retiring the Iraqi dictator was. The account may have been widely ridiculed, but Galloway is probably the only British politician who would be granted such an audience. Why didn’t he accept one of Saddam’s chocolates? “I never eat sweets, my dear. Never.” In his article, Galloway also related how Saddam commented that he had lost weight since their last encounter a few years ago. Galloway smiles when I mention it. “He didn’t have a chocolate either, which is interesting. But everyone else wolfed them down, so I got the impression that the tin doesn’t get brought out all that often.”‘

[war] He wants War. And he thinks he’s ready for it — profile of Saddam Hussein … ‘…he had two sons, Uday and Qusay, who today are his chief lieutenants. In official Iraqi paintings they are usually portrayed as young Arab horsemen loyally riding behind their father, the Sheikh. Family solidarity has been repeatedly shaken by Uday’s murderous rages. In 1988 he killed his father’s bodyguard and confidante during a drunken row at a party on an island in the Tigris river. For many years his power base, bizarrely, has been the Iraqi Olympic Committee which has a large, fortified headquarters in Baghdad with its own prison cells.’

[911] A Blind Spot Called Iraq — review of a book which analyses if Saddam Hussein is behind the attacks on America … ‘Mylroie’s conclusion, reached by relentless forensic analysis of a huge array of human and documentary sources, is that the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing did not, as the Clinton administration claimed at the time, signal the emergence of a ‘new kind of terrorism’ by ‘loose networks’ of Muslim extremists.Instead, it was the first skirmish in ‘a new kind of war’ – sponsored, like old-style wars, by a hostile state, Iraq. Planned as the world’s worst terrorist attack, in which one of the towers would have collapsed into the other amid a cloud of cyanide, the plot’s Iraqi directors simply made use of a little Islamist muscle, stooges who were meant to be caught, in order to conceal its real origin.’