What I've been doing lately - keeping busy and interviewing freedom fighters

Keeping busy mostly. And a good thing too, I'm in DC without my family and if I don't keep busy I miss them dreadfully.

Nonetheless, this is an interesting town - sometimes for surprising reasons.

There are of course the museums, and they are mostly free. I'm going to try and take in the botanical gardens today.

Surprising reason; how dead this town is on weekends. It's Saturday morning and walking outdoors, it feels like Sunday. Evidently, since the major industry is government and the government shuts down on weekends, the city largely does too.

I've got some interesting projects to work on as well. I'm reading a pre-publication copy of Humberto Fontova's 'Uncovering the Real Che Guevarra and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him' for review.

That's going to be interesting - and infuriating. The fact of the existence of a cowardly, murdering psychopath who would (for documented example) shoot a six-months pregnant woman in the belly for "political" reasons is unfortunately, not surprising.

The fact that affluent and influential men and women would openly admire the son-of-a-bitch is infuriating enough to make you want to hurl the book out the window - and then the aforementioned individuals.

My only consolation is, that as tough as it is to read it, it must have been far tougher to write it.

Teaser: OK just this one. Everybody knows about 'The Motorcycle Diaries', that movie about "Those two passionate men" (Che and Fidel) as Hispanic actress Salma Hayek called the two greatest murderers of Hispanics in the 20th century. Well, one of the revelations of the book, attested to by witnesses, was that it was completely phoney - Che was deathly afraid of motorcycles!

Other project, I'm trying to reduce the fire hose of information I got in an interview with Ali Alyami to short article length.

Dr. Alyami is a Saudi in exile, and executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Saudi Arabia. I urge you to look up the center's web site, and remember Dr. Alyami's name, 'cause the chances he's going to figure in homicide statistics some day are... better than average.

I've lived in the Kingdom and written about it, for which I got called a "racist" (most recently in a Scandanavian web site, comment appended to the original post 'Observations on Arabs'.) I was fortunate enough to get an extended interview with Dr. Alyami, perhaps because I was able to tell him that I'd lived in Saudi and worked with Eastern European dissidents, so he knew that I "get it" about tyranny in general and the Kingdom in particular.

So, IMHO Dr. Alyami is the real deal. Everything he told me I can either confirm by direct observation, or is a reasonable inference from what I know and have observed.

Dr. Alyami has lived in the US for 37 years now, and has two children, a son and a daughter. His son in an officer in the US Army and has served a tour in Iraq. I briefly met him and his charming fiance at a reception in the Rayburn House office building. His daughter lives in America - and that's all he or I care to say about that, for obvious reasons.

I hope I can do justice to the subject.

More later.