Did the CIA Prep Gay Porn Videos of Bin Laden & Hussein?

Warfare is not all about guns and bombs; disinformation and psychological manipulation can also be potent weapons. But on the fringes of those tactics are discarded ideas that are too impractical--or sometimes too ridiculous--to be workable.

On occasion, those outlandish ideas have a gay slant, as with the so-called "gay bomb" that the U.S. military contemplated in the 1990s--a chemical compound that would arouse such uncontainable sexual excitement in enemy troops that they would, in theory, drop their weapons and grab one another, forgetting the heat of the battle in the heat of an impromptu all-male orgy. As an added bonus, the burst of gay sex would leave enemy troops emasculated with shame.

Fast-forward from 1994 and the "gay bomb" idea to 2003: as the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, the CIA once more looked at gay ideas to demoralize the other side. Instead of a chemical compound, however, they debated different falsified videos they might use, including a faked film that would purport to show Saddam Hussein and a male teen having sex, according to a May 25 column in the Washington Post.

Osama bin Laden was a target for similar treatment, the article said: in a video that actually was produced, actors portrayed Osama bin Laden and his men drinking around a camp fire and trading boasts about their sexual exploits with boys.

The plot echoed a series of articles published in the Weekly World News, the deliberately absurd tabloid that created "Bat Boy," in which a wedding between Hussein and bin Laden was posited, ending in a breakup between the couple and a heart-broken Hussein retreating to Iraq and a "spider hold" where the dictator would be discovered by Bat Boy.

The CIA reportedly had attempted to use a supposedly gay terrorist's secret sexual orientation to pressure him into becoming a spy embedded in Al Quaeda's ranks, according to a March 16 New York Observer article. Because the CIA had hopes of exploiting the supposedly gay terrorist, other law enforcement agencies were prevented from taking him into custody and he was able to board one of the four doomed flights that were crashed on 9/11, the article said.

Most prevalent in pop culture mythos, however, is the theory that Saddam Hussein had a gay lover: not Osama bin Laden, but rather Satan himself. That claim, never proven, comes from the penetrating minds behind the satirical cartoon series South Park.