Israellycool

Soldier. Hero. Proud Jew.

In a standing-room-only crowd that snaked outside the chapel, Pfc. Daniel Agami was memorialized Tuesday by hundreds of friends – and even some strangers from the local chapter of Jewish War Veterans – as a happy-go-lucky man who was profoundly patriotic.

Agami, 25, who grew up in Broward County, was killed in Baghdad on Thursday.

Rabbi Yossi Denburg of Coral Springs Chabad Lubavitch remembered him as a young man who had “not been given a chance to grow old” and had joined the Army not for a paycheck, but because he found his calling.

After the tearful memorial service at the Star of David Memorial Gardens in North Lauderdale, Agami’s family and friends walked to his burial spot. There were too many people in too many cars to drive to his grave, so they formed a procession and waited until his parents came to take the front row. His mother, Beth Agami, walked while supported in her husband Itzhak’s arms. The sight of them made some of his friends wail.

An Army officer gave his mother a folded flag and a handful of awards including the Purple Heart for being wounded in action, the Bronze Star for his dedication and a gold star lapel pin.

His friends first saw hints of his pending military career after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he consoled them.

“He said, ‘America is going to fix the problem,’” said Rachel Kenner, 24, of Boynton Beach, his friend since childhood. “When he puts his mind to something, that’s it.”

Agami enlisted in the Army two years ago and was assigned to a station in Germany. He had been in Iraq for about a year and was often sent on raids to scope out bombs and other weapons.

He died when an improvised device detonated near his Humvee. The other men in the vehicle were also killed: Alphonso Montenegro II, 22, of Far Rockaway, N.Y.; Ryan M. Wood, 22, of Oklahoma City; Anthony D. Hebert, 19, of Lake City, Minn., and Thomas R. Leemhuis, 23, of Binger, Okla.

Brian Gross, 24, of West Palm Beach, his friend of five years said: “He loved to party. I close my eyes and I remember that.” He said he tries to block the attack on Agami’s Humvee from his mind.

Sandra Becker, Daniel Agami’s grandmother, said the family was moved by the outpouring of hundreds of friends who came to share their tears.

She said she’ll remember him by the nickname that his non-Jewish comrades affectionately gave him: “G.I. Jew.”

“How can you put it in the words? He was the best of the best,” she said.

Agami was well-known for taking pride in teaching his fellow soldiers, many of whom told him they were unfamiliar with his people, about Judaism.

In the Army “Jewish kids often hide the fact they are Jewish,” Rabbi Denburg said. “He was the only Jew on base that was openly proud to say he was a Jew.”

Agami is survived by his parents, Beth and Itzhak, of Parkland, who are known in the Jewish community for their philanthropy.

He is also survived by his sister Shaina, 7, and a brother Ilan, 23, who married just two weeks ago.

Erik Cilen, 25, of Coral Springs, was Agami’s best friend for almost 20 years. Cilen said they spoke the day before his death.

“He told me he was going on a mission and he was scared,” Cilen said. “He had said that if, God forbid, anything happened to him, this is where he belonged.

“I can’t forget him,” he said. Then he started to cry.

Memory-of.com have started this memorial site for Daniel.

G-d bless Daniel, as well as his fallen comrades, and indeed all of those fighting so you and I can enjoy our freedom.

Update: Here’s is Bill O’Reilly on Daniel, who appeared on the O’Reilly Factor in December of last year.

Yesterday, I posted about the dangers of being a barber in both Iran and the palestinian controlled territories. Now you can add Iraq to the list (hat tip: David).

The cleric’s young men fanned out across the neighborhood, moving from shop to shop, posting the new religious decrees.

Printed neatly on white-and-green fliers, the edicts banned vices like “music-filled parties and all kinds of singing.” They proscribed celebratory gunfire at weddings and “the gathering of young men” in front of markets and girls’ schools. Also forbidden were the “selling of liquor and narcotic drugs” and “wearing improper Western clothes.”

But at the bottom of the list of prohibitions was a single command. Scrawled in green ink, it read simply: “Cut hair.”

“I feel powerless,” lamented Moataz Hussein, 22, a wiry, soft-voiced teacher seated in a hair salon on the main road of the Tobji neighborhood on Sunday. His long, stylish black hair was now a recent memory. “They are controlling my life.”

Amid the sectarian strife plaguing Baghdad, a wave of religious fundamentalism is curbing personal freedoms and reshaping the daily lives of Iraqis who have long enjoyed one of the most liberal lifestyles in the Arab world. The measures speak to a central question dangling over the future of Iraq: Can it remain a secular nation at a time when religion is exerting a powerful influence on every aspect of life, from politics to the mundane elements of society?

Sectarian rules for cutting hair
Consider the barbers of Baghdad. Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shiite Muslim extremists have imposed their own sets of rules for the cutting of hair. In recent months, barbers have been killed, threatened or forced to close their shops after being accused of giving haircuts that were considered un-Islamic or too Western.

The new decrees in Tobji, posted last week, came from a little-known council created by the local office of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. It is called the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a title derived from a verse in the Koran.

Inside the hair salon, the flier was posted on a cream-colored wall next to a mirror, visible to every customer. The image of Sadr’s father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a revered ayatollah, who was assassinated in 1999, is emblazoned on the flier, giving it the force of law.

It was signed “The Sadr Martyrs Office” and ended with a warning: “Those who do not comply with these rules will be held accountable.”

Amjad Sabah knows what that means. In the past week, he said, he has lopped off the hair of 20 young customers at his salon, including Hussein. He fears a visit from members of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia linked to Sadr that many Sunni Muslims say runs death squads under the cloak of Islam.

“This is civilization gone backwards,” said Sabah, 20, wearing an orange T-shirt, his hair short and his face cleanshaven. “You can’t have, in 2006, haircuts that are similar to the 1970s. But if I don’t cooperate, they will take me to their office and beat me up.”

The U.S.-led invasion in 2003 ended decades of religious repression by the government of Saddam Hussein. Among Iraq’s Shiite majority, the clerical hierarchy regained prominence, giving Sadr and others greater religious and political stature. But the new freedoms also ushered in a fervent fundamentalism — exacerbated by competing Sunni and Shiite interpretations of Islam — that has become more pronounced in the fourth year of war.

Women have been assailed for not wearing a veil or head scarf. Athletes have been killed for wearing shorts, because some consider it un-Islamic to reveal thighs. Liquor stores have been attacked, and male doctors have been killed for treating female patients. In Sadr’s stronghold of Sadr City and other Shiite-dominated areas, Islamic courts deliver strict, homegrown justice.

Barbers threatened, slain
In early August, a group of armed men walked into Abu Ahmed Jassim’s barbershop in southeast Baghdad. They shot dead his 23-year-old brother and another barber, as well as two customers. Before they left, they set a bomb. Jassim arrived an hour later to find the charred carcass of his shop.

On Monday, Jassim, a short man with a ruddy face, was still visibly distraught. He had just returned from placing a framed picture of his brother at his grave in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

In a low voice, he spoke of the handwritten note a child delivered to a barber in his neighborhood last year. It listed the names of eight barbers from five hair salons. It included Jassim and his brother. “Your destiny is very near,” the note said.

Jassim said he knows why they were targeted. Shiite barbers like him practice khite, an ancient way of removing hair from cheeks and eyebrows with twists of a cotton thread. Radical Sunnis consider this ritual, as well as trimming or removing beards, to be prohibited under Islam.

“This is because of the Takfiri interpretation,” said Jassim, referring to Islamic extremists who adhere to codes of conduct dating to the earliest days of Islam. “We are targeted 100 percent because we are Shiite.”

In the past year, he said, he knew 13 barbers and two customers who were killed in the Baghdad neighborhoods of Adil, Shaab and Mashtal. Dozens more quit the business. “Many of the barbers have closed their shops, and the ones who haven’t closed keep a gun in their shops,” Jassim said.

He said he is making plans to seek asylum in Lebanon: “I’ve lost my spirit to work.”

Taking precautions
In a hair salon in the upscale Karrada neighborhood last week, Sameer Youssef, 32, a Christian, was snipping away at the coal-black hair of Walid Abdul Zahra, 27, a Shiite from the Dora district. He is among dozens of customers who drive through a tangle of checkpoints and barricaded roads to better neighborhoods to get a haircut because there’s a shortage of barbers in their own volatile areas.

“I used to get my hair cut in Dora, but now all the barbers have closed their shops or have been killed,” said Abdul Zahra, who has been coming to the salon for the past six months. “My barber was threatened and had to shut down.”

Abdul Zahra said he wanted only an ordinary haircut, nothing “fancy” that would draw the attention of the Sunni extremists in his neighborhood. “I don’t want to show too much skin,” he said.

Even though Karrada’s barbers have not been targeted, Youssef and colleagues on his corner have taken precautions. To prevent car bombings, they do not allow parking in front of their shops. Suspicious walk-in customers are politely turned away. And they keep their professions a secret.

“I told my neighbors I was making money as a taxi driver,” Youssef said, flashing a weak smile. “I don’t want to lose my life.”

Throughout the year, Tobji has been an arena of sectarian violence marked by reprisal attacks between Sunni extremists and Mahdi Army militiamen. These days, the militia appears to be in control. During two visits over the past week, young civilian men clutching AK-47 assault rifles manned checkpoints in full view of Iraqi policemen passing through.

Other young men stood on street corners, clutching expensive Motorola walkie-talkies. Moqtada Sadr’s face stared from billboards.

New edicts strictly enforced
This protection, and the new edicts, have given Ali Abdul Latif the confidence not to fear Sunni extremists. He used to keep a wooden sign on his counter next to his clippers, hair creams and blades that read: “We don’t do threads.” Now the sign is gone, and Abdul Latif offers the thread to customers again.

But he can’t carve sideburns or small goatees or gel floppy long hair. All that is considered Western, he and other barbers said. In the past week, Abdul Latif said, 15 youths have turned up at his shop, “all of them with hair down to the neck and shoulders.” They wanted their hair short.

“They were scared. They didn’t want to get noticed,” he said.

On the streets of Tobji, they would have been, for the Sadrists consider themselves defenders of their faith. Abu Ahmed, the head of the local Sadr office, said he had placed “one or two men everywhere” — at girls’ schools, at the market, on the main streets — to enforce the new edicts.

“Personal freedom is only in your house or property,” said Abu Ahmed, who asked that his full name not be used. “In the streets, it is no longer a personal freedom.”

Long hair, said Abu Ahmed, is banned because it makes men look feminine. Worse, he added, were haircuts that were long on the sides and short on top, because they were “Jewish haircuts.”

“It is rejected in Islam that you imitate the Jews,” Abu Ahmed said.

If someone is judged to have an improper hairstyle, he said, “we will take him to the barber and we’ll ask the barber to cut his hair according to our regulations. If he refuses, we would send for his father or elder brother and tell them, ‘Either you take this measure or we’ll take the measure for you.’ ”

In the past week, he said, his men had ordered “five or six” men to get haircuts. They didn’t object, he said.

Hussein was not one of them. He had cut his hair a few days before the Sadr office posted the fliers. He had seen people being beaten for having Western haircuts, he said.

“So I accepted readily to cut my hair, so I could be far away from any trouble for me and my family,” Hussein said with a pained look, as he ran his fingers through his short hair.

“Perhaps, I thought, this trouble could cost me my life later.”

Update: More hair-raising Islamic news: In Pakistan, barbers are  liable to get the Bob Woolmer treatment.

February 2001 - Suspected Islamic radicals have issued a warning to barbers in a Pakistani border town not to shave off or cut their customers’ beards, saying it offends Islam, residents said Monday.

Pamphlets with the warnings were found at several shops in Inayat Kalay in Pakistan’s Bajur tribal region near the Afghan border, said Bacha Khan, a barber in the market town.

“Barbers! Correct yourselves,” read the handwritten, Pashtu-language notes, one of which was obtained by The Associated Press.

“Any barber shop where acts against Shariah [Islamic law]–shaving or cutting of beards–are seen, are given a final warning to stop this anti-Shariah work and if they do not stop, they should take responsibility for whatever harm they come to,” it said.

The pamphlets were unsigned. However, Khan said he believed the warnings were from mujahedeen, or holy warriors, a term often used to describe Islamic militants.

He said two dozen barbers had responded by posting notices in their shops asking customers not to insist on getting a shave.

“We do not want to come to harm,” Khan said. “If this work is against Shariah, we will stop it.”

And in an older item (2001) from Afghanistan, the “Leo” look went down about as well as the Titanic:

Barbers in Afghanistan have been jailed for giving customers a haircut styled after Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Titanic.

Officers in the Taleban militia have arrested 28 barbers across the city of Kabul.

“The only reason is they say the barbers cut the youths’ hair in the Titanic style,” a barber at a shopping centre in the city said.

He added that the barbers were accused of popularising anti-Islamic western hairstyles.

The BBC’s Kate Clark in Kabul said barbers had been sent a letter from the Taleban religious police warning them not to give “foreign haircuts”.

See below for updates

Looks like Saddam was well hung.

Yes, I do realize that this is already old noose news, but in my defence, it was the Jewish Sabbath, and I had no idea until a few minutes ago that the evil one had met his grisly end.

So given that I cannot really add too much to what has already been said about his execution, I will point you to some of my previous posts making fun of the tyrant.

Excerpts from Saddam Hussein’s Memoirs - Parts 1,2,3,4,5
One Day in Court
Saddam on the Offensive (Smell)
Saddam Separated at Birth: Lion Edition
Saddam Separated at Birth: Captain Caveman Edition
Saddam Separated at Birth: Mad Max Edition

Enjoy! And remember: the evilness factor in the world dropped a couple of percentage points today.

Updates (Israel time):

8:20PM: Mourning in the palestinian-controlled territories:

The execution of Saddam Hussein sent many Palestinians into deep mourning Saturday as they struggled to come to terms with the demise of perhaps their most steadfast ally.

Unlike much of the rest of the world, where Saddam was viewed as a brutal dictator who oppressed his people and started regional wars, in the West Bank and Gaza he was seen as a generous benefactor unafraid to fight for the Palestinian cause, even to the end.

—-

Saddam’s final words were reportedly, “Palestine is Arab.”

“We heard of his martyrdom, and I swear to God we were deeply shaken from within,” said Khadejeh Ahmad from the Qadora refugee camp in the West Bank. “Nobody was as supportive or stood with the Palestinians as he did.”

During the first Gulf War in 1991, the Palestinians cheered Saddam’s missile attacks on Israel, chanting “Beloved Saddam, strike Tel Aviv,” as the Scud missiles flew overhead.

He further endeared himself to the Palestinians during the recent uprising with Israel by giving US$25,000 to the family of each suicide bomber and US$10,000 for each Palestinian killed in fighting. The stipends amounted to an estimated US$35 million.

Saddam’s support for the Palestinians, whose cause is deeply popular with Arabs throughout the Middle East, was at least partially aimed at gaining widespread support throughout the Arab world.

“Saddam was a person who had the ability to say, ‘No’ in the face of a great country,” said Hosni al Ejel, 46, from the al Amari refugee camp near Ramallah.

“He wanted the Palestinian people to have a state and a government and to be united. But God supports us, and we pray to God to punish those who did this,” said Ghanem Mezel, 72, from the town of Saeer in the southern West Bank.

Others were happy to hear Saddam’s final words, knowing that his support for them remained unshakable until the end.

Palestinians in the West Bank town of Bethlehem opened a “house of condolences” where people can gather to mourn Saddam. The organizers hung Iraqi flags, pictures of Saddam and broadcast Iraqi revolutionary songs.

Mohammed Barghouti, the minister of labor in the Hamas-led Palestinian Cabinet, said that although his Islamic group was often at odds with the secular Saddam, his execution was wrong.

“The Palestinians had bonded with Iraqis in brotherhood,” he said.

8:55PM: Looks like Saddam was born on Tatooine (thanks to Israellycool reader Mark for the Saddam picture)

10:40PM: Would you like fries with that? Saddam reportedly had a thing for infidel food..right to the end.

British newspaper The Daily Mirror reported that the ousted president, who was so virulently opposed to American presence in the Middle East, spent his last days eating some of the foods most associated with the United States – hamburger and fries.

According to the same report which relied on one of Saddam’s military aides, Saddam liked to eat hamburgers and fries and deliberately chose to eat Western fare during his last days.

11:20PM: Via WND is this footage of a newsreader choking at news of the croking.

Thanks to Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq, lopping off someone’s hair could result in a lopped off head. 

The cleric’s young men fanned out across the neighborhood, moving from shop to shop, posting the new religious decrees.

Printed neatly on white-and-green fliers, the edicts banned vices like “music-filled parties and all kinds of singing.” They proscribed celebratory gunfire at weddings and “the gathering of young men” in front of markets and girls’ schools. Also forbidden were the “selling of liquor and narcotic drugs” and “wearing improper Western clothes.”

But at the bottom of the list of prohibitions was a single command. Scrawled in green ink, it read simply: “Cut hair.”

“I feel powerless,” lamented Moataz Hussein, 22, a wiry, soft-voiced teacher seated in a hair salon on the main road of the Tobji neighborhood on Sunday. His long, stylish black hair was now a recent memory. “They are controlling my life.”

Amid the sectarian strife plaguing Baghdad, a wave of religious fundamentalism is curbing personal freedoms and reshaping the daily lives of Iraqis who have long enjoyed one of the most liberal lifestyles in the Arab world. The measures speak to a central question dangling over the future of Iraq: Can it remain a secular nation at a time when religion is exerting a powerful influence on every aspect of life, from politics to the mundane elements of society?

Consider the barbers of Baghdad. Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shiite Muslim extremists have imposed their own sets of rules for the cutting of hair. In recent months, barbers have been killed, threatened or forced to close their shops after being accused of giving haircuts that were considered un-Islamic or too Western.

The new decrees in Tobji, posted last week, came from a little-known council created by the local office of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. It is called the Committee for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a title derived from a verse in the Koran.

Inside the hair salon, the flier was posted on a cream-colored wall next to a mirror, visible to every customer. The image of Sadr’s father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a revered ayatollah, who was assassinated in 1999, is emblazoned on the flier, giving it the force of law.

It was signed “The Sadr Martyrs Office” and ended with a warning: “Those who do not comply with these rules will be held accountable.”

Amjad Sabah knows what that means. In the past week, he said, he has lopped off the hair of 20 young customers at his salon, including Hussein. He fears a visit from members of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia linked to Sadr that many Sunni Muslims say runs death squads under the cloak of Islam.

“This is civilization gone backwards,” said Sabah, 20, wearing an orange T-shirt, his hair short and his face cleanshaven. “You can’t have, in 2006, haircuts that are similar to the 1970s. But if I don’t cooperate, they will take me to their office and beat me up.”

—-

In early August, a group of armed men walked into Abu Ahmed Jassim’s barbershop in southeast Baghdad. They shot dead his 23-year-old brother and another barber, as well as two customers. Before they left, they set a bomb. Jassim arrived an hour later to find the charred carcass of his shop.

On Monday, Jassim, a short man with a ruddy face, was still visibly distraught. He had just returned from placing a framed picture of his brother at his grave in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

In a low voice, he spoke of the handwritten note a child delivered to a barber in his neighborhood last year. It listed the names of eight barbers from five hair salons. It included Jassim and his brother. “Your destiny is very near,” the note said.

Jassim said he knows why they were targeted. Shiite barbers like him practice khite, an ancient way of removing hair from cheeks and eyebrows with twists of a cotton thread. Radical Sunnis consider this ritual, as well as trimming or removing beards, to be prohibited under Islam.

“This is because of the Takfiri interpretation,” said Jassim, referring to Islamic extremists who adhere to codes of conduct dating to the earliest days of Islam. “We are targeted 100 percent because we are Shiite.”

In the past year, he said, he knew 13 barbers and two customers who were killed in the Baghdad neighborhoods of Adil, Shaab and Mashtal. Dozens more quit the business. “Many of the barbers have closed their shops, and the ones who haven’t closed keep a gun in their shops,” Jassim said.

He said he is making plans to seek asylum in Lebanon: “I’ve lost my spirit to work.”

In a hair salon in the upscale Karrada neighborhood last week, Sameer Youssef, 32, a Christian, was snipping away at the coal-black hair of Walid Abdul Zahra, 27, a Shiite from the Dora district. He is among dozens of customers who drive through a tangle of checkpoints and barricaded roads to better neighborhoods to get a haircut because there’s a shortage of barbers in their own volatile areas.

“I used to get my hair cut in Dora, but now all the barbers have closed their shops or have been killed,” said Abdul Zahra, who has been coming to the salon for the past six months. “My barber was threatened and had to shut down.”

Abdul Zahra said he wanted only an ordinary haircut, nothing “fancy” that would draw the attention of the Sunni extremists in his neighborhood. “I don’t want to show too much skin,” he said.

Even though Karrada’s barbers have not been targeted, Youssef and colleagues on his corner have taken precautions. To prevent car bombings, they do not allow parking in front of their shops. Suspicious walk-in customers are politely turned away. And they keep their professions a secret.

“I told my neighbors I was making money as a taxi driver,” Youssef said, flashing a weak smile. “I don’t want to lose my life.”

Throughout the year, Tobji has been an arena of sectarian violence marked by reprisal attacks between Sunni extremists and Mahdi Army militiamen. These days, the militia appears to be in control. During two visits over the past week, young civilian men clutching AK-47 assault rifles manned checkpoints in full view of Iraqi policemen passing through.

Other young men stood on street corners, clutching expensive Motorola walkie-talkies. Moqtada Sadr’s face stared from billboards.

This protection, and the new edicts, have given Ali Abdul Latif the confidence not to fear Sunni extremists. He used to keep a wooden sign on his counter next to his clippers, hair creams and blades that read: “We don’t do threads.” Now the sign is gone, and Abdul Latif offers the thread to customers again.

But he can’t carve sideburns or small goatees or gel floppy long hair. All that is considered Western, he and other barbers said. In the past week, Abdul Latif said, 15 youths have turned up at his shop, “all of them with hair down to the neck and shoulders.” They wanted their hair short.

“They were scared. They didn’t want to get noticed,” he said.

—-

Long hair, said Abu Ahmed, is banned because it makes men look feminine. Worse, he added, were haircuts that were long on the sides and short on top, because they were “Jewish haircuts.”

“It is rejected in Islam that you imitate the Jews,” Abu Ahmed said.

If someone is judged to have an improper hairstyle, he said, “we will take him to the barber and we’ll ask the barber to cut his hair according to our regulations. If he refuses, we would send for his father or elder brother and tell them, ‘Either you take this measure or we’ll take the measure for you.’ ”

In the past week, he said, his men had ordered “five or six” men to get haircuts. They didn’t object, he said.

Hussein was not one of them. He had cut his hair a few days before the Sadr office posted the fliers. He had seen people being beaten for having Western haircuts, he said.

“So I accepted readily to cut my hair, so I could be far away from any trouble for me and my family,” Hussein said with a pained look, as he ran his fingers through his short hair.

“Perhaps, I thought, this trouble could cost me my life later.”

Omar from Iraq the Model has been monitoring reactions from an Arabic forum to the kidnap of Gilad Shalit and Israel’s response in the form of Operation Summer Rains.

About three dozens of comments were made by Iraqis both inside Iraq and in exile and all these comments were supportive of Israel or at least against Hamas as far as the topic is concerned except for only three comments; that’s a 10:1 ratio while as you probably have guesses, the opposite ratio is true about the comments by the rest of Arabs.

As Omar writes:

But what really makes me feel optimistic about this new Iraqi way of thinking is that it shows how Iraqis are beginning to distinguish between terrorism and rightful acts of resistance not only in Iraq but also on a global level and are showing decreasing tolerance for extremism and this in my opinion is what builds peace in the region or any given region of this world.

Read the whole post, including the comments themselves.

CNN are reporting that terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed. The US are apparently waiting for the Iraqi Prime Minister to make a public announcement of the death before commenting on the report officially.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki confirmed his death at a press conference.

 

He told journalists: “Today, al Zarqawi was terminated,” drawing loud applause and cheers from those present.

A recent report has revealed one of Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons: Suicide camels.

According to a report of the Sunday Telegraph, Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein had planned to use “camels of mass destruction” as defense against invading western occupation forces, reported Ynet.

The camels, the reports said, would be fitted with explosives devices to attack unsuspecting enemy forces.
 
A detailed 37-page document revealed that shortly before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam planned the explosive camel project in preparation for the imminent war.

The memo, which was reportedly discovered at the beginning of the American invasion, was only recently revealed to the public.

The document was reportedly published recently by the US Pentagon on its website in handwritten Arabic, in the hopes of finding translators who spoke the native Iraqi dialect in which it was written.

The document details a program of resistance, in which one phase will include “activating body explosives, with the aid of motorcycles, cars, and camels”.

Camels “will be supplied by the general intelligence,” the document said.

Color me unimpressed. That is so unoriginal.

Saddam Hussein has told the judges hearing his trial to “go to hell” during a furious outburst in court in which he complained of having no clean underwear.

—-

Saddam told the judges to “go to hell” and claimed he and his co-defendants had “no chance to take a shower and no chance to smoke a cigarette”.

—-

Saddam denounced his trial for crimes against humanity as an US-inspired farce pandering to electoral agendas. He then pleaded exhaustion and said he lacked clean clothes.

 

The Associated Press reported he told the court: “Are you deliberately hauling defendants before the trial when they are exhausted? … This is your business, but I want to clarify to you that … we have spent these days in this shirt.

“There is no underwear, no chance to take a shower and no chance to smoke a cigarette if some do smoke, no chance for one to walk a couple of steps outside the small room. This is terrorism.”

“You know what? You can just go to hell!”

“There is no underwear, no chance to take a shower and no chance to smoke a cigarette if some do smoke, no chance for one to walk a couple of steps outside the small room. For goodness sake, look at me! I am so badly in need of a smoke, my hand is shaking uncontrollably. This is terrorism!”

“Just give me a second to confirm it..yes, my Quran says that this is definitely terrorism.”

“Ok, maybe I got a bit carried away. But please! I’m begging you..please at least let me change my underwear!”

Judge1: “What do you think?”

Judge2: “Considering I can smell him from here, let’s do it - for the sake of everyone else in this courtroom!”

Judge1: “Ok then, Hussein. Go change outside.”

Angered by negative portrayals of the conflict in Iraq, Bruce Willis, the Hollywood star, is to make a pro-war film in which American soldiers will be depicted as brave fighters for freedom and democracy.

 

It will be based on the exploits of the heavily decorated members of Deuce Four, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, which has spent the past year battling insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul.

 

Willis attended Deuce Four’s homecoming ball this month in Seattle, Washington, where the soldiers are on leave, along with Stephen Eads, the producer of Armageddon and The Sixth Sense.

 

The 50-year-old actor said that he was in talks about a film of “these guys who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom.”

He is expected to base the film on the writings of the independent blogger Michael Yon, a former special forces green beret who was embedded with Deuce Four and sent regular dispatches about their heroics.

 

Yon was at the soldiers’ ball with Willis, who got to know him through his internet war reports on www.michaelyon.blogspot.com. “What he is doing is something the American media and maybe the world media isn’t doing,” the actor said, “and that’s telling the truth about what’s happening in the war in Iraq.”

 

Willis is likely to take on the role of the unit’s commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Erik Kurilla, 39, a Bruce Willis lookalike with a chest full of medals, more hair than Willis and a glamorous blonde wife.

 

He was injured in August after being shot three times by insurgents “in front of my eyes”, Yon recorded in his blog: “He continued to direct his men until a medic gave him morphine and the men took him away.”

 

Kurilla now has a titanium plate in his leg. He met Willis at the ball and said that his men were “very excited and appreciative that he was there”. “

“Got any purple ink?”