Stephen Schwartz , an opinion columnist for the New York Post, advances yesterday’s identification of the Mosul Tent Bomber.
Not only was Ahmed Said Ahmed al Ghamdi a Saudi national and cousin to three of the September 11 hijackers but Schwartz, this morning reports the cowardly bomber was the eldest son of “Sayyid al Ghamdi, former head of the Saudi diplomatic mission in Sudan, a country ruled by an Islamist regime that once played host to Osama bin Laden himself.”
Middle Eastern news accounts, yesterday, while not identifying Ambassador al Ghamdi reported him saying that his son Ahmed had stayed on in the Sudan after his own diplomatic mission concluded and that “the son then cleaned out his personal bank account and told his father he was headed for Iraq to kill Americans.”
The Post goes on to report that the information office of the Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington, big surprise, did not respond to their calls.
A Google, today, shows that editors at the Army, Navy and Marine Times considered the bomber’s identity important enough to print the original Associated Press account but the story has still, to the best of my knowledge, not cracked the self-important façade of big print or television.

I’m grateful to Richard Cranium of Philly’s The All Spin Zone for linking to yesterday’s post and for his comment on my still almost blushingly virgin comment area.


Postings may be somewhat infrequent as Santa brought some excellent reading material this year including the best Science Fiction novel I’ve read in years, Julie E. Czerneda’s Survival.
Santa also added to my gay studies bookshelf with Meredith Weatherby’s translation of Yukio Mishima’s 1951 (first English publication in 1958) autobiography Kamen No Kokuhaku or Confessions of a Mask and C.A. Tripp’s long anticipated The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.
I have been fascinated by the lives and actions of both men for most of my life and for what I had once thought were different reasons.
Mishima first came to my attention in my 16th year through TIME magazine’s coverage of his takeover of the University of Tokyo and the ceremonial seppuku performed by himself and his boyfriend atop the University’s administration building.
A Japanese Catholic, Mishima’s fascination with motorcycles, leather, certain images of Catholic saints and ancient Japan, along with his dramatic death, heightened my own fevered teen interest.
Growing up in the bluegrass state, perhaps in part, explains my lifelong interest in Kentucky’s only and America’s 16th President.
I’ve always found it difficult to look at a photograph of Lincoln.
I get chills.
I know this sounds strange but as a child, raised on stories of his restless spirit walking the White House, I wasn’t afraid of boogiemen haunting my bedroom; I was afraid of opening my eyes to see Lincoln’s sad face staring at my child’s bed.
Hey, I’ve never made any claims to normalcy!
Our greatest President has long intrigued this humble blogger and it will be highly interesting to read that, perhaps, we have more in common than just being awkward fellows from Kentucky.
Another hero, Gore Vidal, has written a web-only essay, Was Lincoln Bisexual?, about Tripp’s Lincoln book and I recommend it to your attention.

Photo: Amazon.com

- posted by Sean @ 3:41 PM