Arafat Appoints Longest Serving Palestinian Prisoner as Adviser

And now the most intriguing two minutes in television, the latest from the wartime grapevine:

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Ahmed Appointed Arafat's Adviser
Ahmed Jabarra (search), the longest serving Palestinian prisoner released two weeks ago by Israel as a goodwill gesture the night before the Aqaba Summit for Peace, has now been appointed Yasser Arafat's special adviser for prisoners' affairs. Palestinian officials tell the Jerusalem Post that Jabarra, known as the "Fridge Bomber" for murdering 14 people in 1975 with a bomb-rigged refrigerator, was a "natural" choice for the position considering his "great contribution to the Palestinian cause."

Beers Blasts Bush
Rand Beers, former White House counterterrorism aide, says he left the Bush administration disgusted at what he considered the misplaced focus on Iraq. Beers, a registered Democrat who has since gone to work for Democratic Senator and presidential candidate John Kerry (search), told the Washington Post he considered the intelligence on Iraq ambiguous. Not mentioned in the Post story is that two years ago, Beers himself falsely testified under oath that Colombian terrorists received training from Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. A year later he had to publicly rescind the statement because he said, "There doesn't seem to be any evidence" to support it.

Condemning Saddam and Coalition
Mohammed Al-Douri (search), former Iraqi envoy to the United Nations, is now condemning his former boss and says Saddam Hussein deserved to be toppled, but by the Iraqis themselves, not by the "colonialist power" now in Iraq. He tells the BBC, "We didn't ask you to come." And Al-Douri says Saddam never believed the United States ever actually would. And he says he still believes Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction.

Dealing with David
If your name is David Nelson, and even if you are the now 66-year-old David Nelson from the old Ozzie and Harriet radio and TV series, this is a bad time to travel by air. That's because Transportation Security officials have the name David Nelson on some terrorist suspect list and have, according to the Los Angeles Daily News, stopped, detained or otherwise hassled at least 30 men by that name in recent weeks. TSA officials say it's a computer software problem, and David Nelson, who was stopped at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, says it must be, since his full name is David Ozzie Nelson, and he doubts there are many terrorists with that name.