When most people think of the name "Saddam Hussein", the connotations aren't positive. After all, there was a time, not that long ago, when Saddam was considered to be the prime threat to world peace; responsible for two wars fought against the United States in Iraq, and a key player in the war against terror. In the west, his impassive, moustached face inspired equal parts dread and caricature and in the States, his execution was widely celebrated after he was sentenced to death by hanging in 2006. The essayist, journalist and author Christopher Hitchens once stated "Saddam Hussein is a bad guy's bad guy. He's not just bad in himself but the cause of badness in others. While he survives not only are the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples compelled to live in misery and fear ... but their neighbours are compelled to live in fear as well." Hussein was President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. A leading member of the Ba'ath Party, a revolutionary Arab socialist-nationalist group,  Saddam was determined to modernise Iraq and improve its ailing infrastructure. Yet due to the various divisions in the country - between Sunni and Shi'ite, and Arab and Kurd - Saddam felt justified in being as brutal as possible to pursue this industrialisation. Over the next 30 years, Hussein would improve the Iraqi economy and grant a few sparing women's rights. Yet he also brutally persecuted ethnic minorities, particularly Kurds and Jews, and murdered hundreds of thousands with chemical weapons during the Al-Anfal campaign. This is the official history of the man - the side of him which made headlines and kept the western world afraid. But what you might not know is that the Iraqi dictator actually had literary ambitions. In fact, the mass murderer wrote several books, including a 160-page allegorical love story which you can even find on Amazon. The romance novel, which is entitled Zabiba and the King ($29.95 hardcover, $13.95 paperback) tells the story of a powerful ruler of medieval Iraq who lives in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit. It follows his love affair with a beautiful peasant girl named Zabibah, who is trapped in an abusive and loveless marriage with a husband who rapes her - an act which apparently symbolises the United States' invasion of Iraq. In one memorable passage, Hussein describes a bizarre sex act between a woman and a bear, writing: "Even an animal respects a man’s desire, if it wants to copulate with him ... Doesn’t a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the North of Iraq? She drags him into her den so he, obeying her desire, would copulate with her." When it was first published back in 2000, the CIA analysed the book closely. They determined that it was likely that most of the book was ghostwritten, with only a portion of the material actually provided by Hussein himself.  The book was a bestseller in Iraq when it was originally published for 1,500 dinars ($0.50) and an estimated one million copies were sold. The book's royalties all went to "the poor, the orphans, the miserable, the needy, and [other] charities." The Iraqi publishers used a number of images created by Canadian artist Jonathon Earl Bowser as illustrations the novel. Bowser did not authorise the use of his work for Hussein's novels and has pursued compensation for copyright infringement.

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The novel's blurb states: "While it is no secret that the release of this book in Arabic was an overnight best seller in Iraq and even became an on-stage musical production in Baghdad, the book promotes the establishment of a quasi-democratic form of government that the editor and others believe would not have been allowed to be published in Iraq unless Saddam were intimately involved in its creation. Many Iraqis firmly believe it was penned by Saddam Hussein." Other novels written by Hussein include the 713-page text The Fortified Castle, which concerns the delayed wedding of a Kurdish girl to Iraqi hero Sabah, who fought in the Iran-Iraq war.  This particular doorstopper uses the metaphor a "fortified castle" to discuss issues of nationalist martyrdom in Saddam's Iraq. Despite repeated requests to divide or sell the building, Sabah's mother refuses to let it go, stating that it cannot be purchased with money but: "Only those who give it their blood and defend it are its rightful owners." This is a clear reference to the militarisation and jingoism which characterised Saddam's regime. Hussein's last book was entitled Begone, Demons and was allegedly finished the day before the US invasion. It involves a Zionist-Christian conspiracy against Arabs and Muslims. The Arab army manages to defeat the conspirators by invading their enemy's land and destroying two massive towers, in a disturbing reference to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Although it's doubtful that Hussein's furtive scribblings will ever be taken seriously as a romance novel (I can't see readers swooning over the protagonist the same way they do with Mr Darcy for example) these texts are still valuable documents, giving us an intimate insight into the mind of one of the the great butchers of the modern age, and the ethos which motivated him to oppress and torture so many. Perhaps we can use these insights to guard against other despots in the future, or work towards ending extremism and terrorism around the world.

Whenever celebrities get vocal about a cause, people are quick to point out their hypocrisy. Particularly when it comes to immigrants and refugees, wealthy movie stars who advocate for limitless immigration are accused of not putting their money where their mouth is, leaving common people to deal with housing and employment issues while they skate by unaffected. These people certainly have a point. Immigrants will ultimately bolster a Western country's economy and ageing population, but how exactly are they supposed to compete for housing, or jobs? Won't citizens be pushed out of their already tepid standing in society? Well, when it comes to refugees, George Clooney has decided to take matters into his own hands. In The Hollywood Reporter, the veteran actor revealed that he and his wife Amal have been allowing a Yazidi refugee to stay in one of their homes, in Augusta, Kentucky. The Yazidi are a Kurdish ethnic and religious minority in Iraq, and ISIS in particular is hunting them down. ISIS, in its fanatical approach to Islam, considers the Yazidi to be devil-worshippers because they believe that the Luciferic fallen angel figure of Islam and Christianity has been redeemed and returned to Heaven, not been cast into Hell. They're considered infidels by Al-Qaeda, and faced several genocidal attacks throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Clooney did not give out any personal information about the particular refugee he was hosting, but described how he got there. "He was on this bus to Mosul, and ISIS shot the two bus drivers and said, 'Anybody who wants to go to college, we will shoot them.'" It's a common feature of totalitarian ideologies, from the old Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to ISIS in the Middle East: education is vilified. "He survived and came to America. He got through all the checks, and once he got through those, it was like, 'Listen, we got your back. You want to get an education? You want to move your life forward? This is something that we can do.' " Clooney says the man is now a student at the University of Chicago. We're not entirely sure how he commutes from Kentucky to Chicago, but hey, I'm sure Clooney has a lot of houses for him to stay at around the city. Clooney has been known for his philanthropy, and plans to give one million dollars to the Southern Poverty Law Center this year. Between raising money for Darfur and environmentalist causes, he certainly tries to do some good, along with his wife Amal, who is a human rights lawyer and has even worked for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. If you have several houses and hundreds of millions of dollars, why not use them to do what you think is right? After all, you don't need higher taxes to start giving away some of your own money, and you don't need to wait for the government to start housing refugees if you've got empty homes. In related news, it seems that Cher may also be providing comfort for some other people who need a place to stay - immigrants. At least, if Twitter can rid itself of collective amnesia long enough to hold her to it: [[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/cher/status/905116735216517120]] [[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/bwebb56/status/905124843892256768]] [[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/cher/status/905125640504041472]] Let's hope she follows through! If Hollywood actually uses its money to house and help those they sympathise with, then they'll at least be active in their beliefs.

A former CIA officer turned whistleblower has revealed what he calls a haunting truth about the intelligence community’s knowledge of Osama bin Laden before the September 11 attacks.

John Kiriakou, 61, served as a CIA agent between 1990 and 2004, working in multiple countries around the world.

After 9/11, he became the CIA's Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan, where he was tasked with capturing al-Qaeda personnel.

But speaking recently on the MAD THAT podcast, Kiriakou said that before the attacks, the agency’s understanding of al-Qaeda was shockingly limited.

CIA Knew Very Little About Al-Qaeda Leading Up To 9/11

Kiriakou revealed to the hosts that the CIA had created 'this thing called the high-value targets division'.

"We had not yet captured a high-value target, and we didn’t know a whole lot about al-Qaeda," he added.

While the agency was aware of key figures, its broader intelligence picture was incomplete.

"We knew that it was founded and headed by Osama bin Laden.

"The Number two was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had been the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad...

"Number three had been Muhammad Atif, but we killed Muhammad Atif in a bombing in Tora Bora in October of 2001," he said.

Beyond that, he said, the agency was largely in the dark.

"We didn't know anything else about al-Qaeda. We had no idea what the structure of it looked like. We had no idea where the cells were located," he shared.

How 9/11 'Changed' The CIA

According to Kiriakou, the attacks fundamentally changed the agency’s mission.

"It went from an organization whose mission was to recruit spies to steal secrets to a paramilitary organization whose job it was to travel around the world and to kill as many people as they could kill,” he said.

After leaving the CIA, Kiriakou became one of its most notable whistleblowers, exposing the agency’s enhanced interrogation program and the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding.

In 2012, he was convicted of passing classified information to the media and sentenced to 30 months in prison.

He served time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania between February 2013 and February 2015, followed by three months of house arrest.

Inside The CIA’s Torture Program

During the podcast, Kiriakou detailed interrogation methods he said were used in the years following 9/11.

He described some techniques as 'essentially harmless,' such as when you 'grab a suspect by the shirt, and they say, 'answer my question''.

Another, known as the belly slap, involved slapping a detainee’s bare stomach.

"It makes a cracking sound. It leaves a handprint. It's a little bit embarrassing," he remarked.

However, he said three methods were particularly severe, including waterboarding and a practice known as the "cold cell."

In the 'cold cell,' he explained: "The prisoner is stripped naked, chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling, so he can't sit or lay or kneel or get comfortable in any way."

"The cell is chilled to 50° Fahrenheit. And then every hour a CIA officer goes in and throws a bucket of ice water on him," he said, adding that agents 'killed prisoners with that technique. They died of hypothermia.'

Sleep deprivation was another tactic.

"Around day nine, their organs begin to fail, and they begin to die. But the CIA was allowed, the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for as long as 12 days," he said.

Kiriakou has long said he opposed the torture program, which ultimately led to his whistleblowing.

'We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are'

In a separate interview with Steven Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Kiriakou offered a more comprehensive critique of the intelligence community.

Referencing the CIA’s reputation, he said: "We're not as smart as we think we are. We're not as worldly as we think we are.

"We've pretty much missed every major global development since 1947."

He also shared that intelligence agencies spend billions of dollars on 'spying on Americans. Whether it's NSA, CIA, FBI, or intelligence community contractors, nothing is secret. Nothing'.

He added: "So if they decide they want you, they don't like your politics, they can get your metadata, they can go through that metadata, find crimes that they can charge you with and ruin your life.

"And there's nothing you can do to protect yourself."

Featured image credit: Getty Images

Alex Jones is the host of Infowars, a conspiracy theory show that called Sandy Hook a fake massacre, a "false flag" designed to take away Americans' guns. He rose to fame in 2000, when he videotaped the burning of the owl ritual at Bohemain Grove, a bizarre pagan gathering of male elite billionaires, and also attended by some ex-Presidents. Now, he's posted a clip of his show from last Friday, arguing that he predicted the Las Vegas shooting. "They are preparing a violent overthrow sometime in November, October. Now, why do you think the communists are suddenly uncloaking themselves? Because after growing under the floorboards, they want to look like a legitimate government, when they take over, and when they call for the racial war, when they call for the uprising. "This is a playbook, and it's from them, they're saying this is happening, and they're being allowed to gear u and prepare for it. What will it be in a month? What will it be in just a few weeks? It snuck up on us, hasn't it? It's the October Revolution...it's the 100 year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, we're here, it's happening now. This is real." That's right, the Las Vegas shooting was part of a coup against Trump being waged by communists. How? Well, that's the missing part of the theory. Ah well. Jones claims that more terror attacks are coming throughout October and November, all with the express goal of removing Trump. In another video, Jones called the shooting "scripted by deep state Democrats and their Islamic allies." Oh, so there are jihadist Muslims working with the communists? Why yes, of course. He says the shooter, Stephen Paddock, had "converted to Islam in the last two months". Now, ISIS did claim the Las Vegas shooting as their own. But there's no evidence that ISIS can prove that in any way, and are probably just latching onto any attack in America as a false show of strength. The Bolshevik-ISIS alliance is also quite curious and ahistorical. But that's what Jones does! This is nothing new, it's just a routine hatching of absurdity. What's really strange is that Jones claims that Trump has called him before, and that the two are friends. Jones has interviewed Trump on his show, so it's likely. They're buddies. Also, Jones believes that George W. Bush and his administration committed 9/11. So he's just cool with Republicans now? Alex Jones has also gone through a recent divorce and custody battle, in which his lawyers argued that Jones is "playing a character" after clips of his show were used as evidence to argue that he cannot properly raise children. Wow. So, Jones as a performance artist makes a lot of sense. He's larger-than-life, he has great videos where he goes on science fiction rants about 'vampire pedophiles in the government' and rips off his shirt while screaming about his love for Hillary Clinton. He's a great actor, just a really really bad conspiracy theorist. Alex Jones is stationed in Austin, Texas, and is a really crazy guy. What do you think of him?

What happens in Area 51 is a mystery to the vast majority of us, and a lot of people are eager to know if there are any extraterrestrial goings on.

An unnamed man, who claims to be a former CIA agent, may hold the answers those who are seeking the truth crave, having "revealed all" whilst on his deathbed.

Area 51 is a military base at Groom Lake, a dry lake bed in the Nevada Desert, and is often at the center of conspiracy theories regarding aliens, per the BBC.

Members of the public are unable to get close to the base due to multiple warning signs, electronic surveillance, and armed guards patrolling the perimeter, and this only adds to the intrigue of what happens there.

The alleged former CIA agent took part in "The Anonymous Interview", created by documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, as first reported by HowandWhys.

The 77-year-old explained to UFO researcher Richard Dolan that he was speaking at great risk, so didn't want to use his name. He went on to say he hasn't got much time left anyway due to kidney problems.

The man alleged that he worked for the CIA between 1957 to 1960 and his job was to analyze evidence of extraterrestrial beings.

Area 51 is only accessible by authorized individuals. Credit: Peter Griffin / Alamy

He claims that he was transported to Area 51 to look at an array of UFOs that had been discovered by the US military, including the famous flying saucer that supposedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947.

The CIA agent alleged that President Dwight Eisenhower was concerned about a threat to humanity by extraterrestrial beings, so sent agents to Area 51 to gather evidence and report back to him.

It was there that the man claims he observed aliens that were still alive. He described a grey alien that "didn’t look human as far as the skin tone" and outlined features such as a larger brain, with only holes for its ears and nostrils.

The former agent went on to describe how these aliens were able to travel through galaxies. He said that the power source was able to reverse gravity, and even claimed he received the mathematical code as to how this was possible.

Irving Newton holding the debris of the alleged flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico, 1947. Credit: Chronicle / Alamy

Area 51 was subject to a Facebook event called "Storm Area 51," where those wanting to know the truth were to gather outside the perimeter in September 2019 and rush into the military base together, per the BBC.

The event gathered millions of followers, but only a handful showed up and Area 51 remained uninfiltrated.

You can see the full interview with the former CIA agent here.

Featured image credit: Andrey Volodin / Alamy