In this 1994 post-Desert-Storm interview, Dick Cheney is asked if UN troops should have invaded Bagdhad. His confident and emphatic reply? "No." And why is that? Well, he says:

1. If we'd gone in there, we would have been alone, without the support of other forces.

2. Once we'd taken down Saddam's regime, what would we put in its place? It's a volatile region, and if you destabilized the central government, you create the possibility of pieces of Iraq splitting off, either voluntarily or by the force of neighbors such as Syria and Iran.

3. While Desert Storm had a low-by-military-statistics number of casualties (146), as Cheney points out, those numbers were not small to the fallen soldiers or the people who loved them. So the natural next question becomes, "How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgement was, not very many, and I think we got it right."

Um... Was there some kind of pod person incident sometime after '94 I'm unaware of? Where was this guy in March 2003? 'Cause this guy is all chatty and reasonable and cautious and forthcoming with information and whatnot. But here we are with the thousands of dead Americans and the Iraqi citizens getting blown up by car bombs every day, and I look at this interview and I feel like Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer: "Once again, things that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!"

Thanks to the priorities of American news coverage, you may not have heard this, but on July 19 -- for context, around the time that Lindsay was getting out of rehab and Britney was frigging up her OK cover shoot -- 23 South Korean aid workers were captured by Taliban militants in Afghanistan. Since then, two of the seven male hostages have been murdered, and according to the captors, two of the 16 female hostages are gravely ill.

The Afghan government, which has a non-negotation policy when it comes to terrorists, has ruled out the possibility of meeting the militants' demands and releasing jailed insurgents, though a face-to-face sitdown may still be in the works.

But the families of the hostages are taking an extraordinary action. They are posting videos online on YouTube, reaching out to their imprisoned loved ones and appealing to the captors. In this video, Ryu Hang Sik sends a message to his wife, Kim Yun-yeong. He tells her how much he loves her, how proud her children are of her, and asks her to hold on just a little bit longer. Watching him read his letter aloud, his fist clenching in his lap as he reviles himself for sleeping and eating when he knows his wife doesn't even have those simple privileges, it's hard to imagine anyone would not be moved.

More videos will follow. Let's hope that somehow, they reach both captives and captors, and maybe it'll be hearts and not heads that make the difference in this crisis.

Most of the Iraq War's propaganda videos we've seen -- whether they're for the war or against it -- tend to be put together without too much thought behind them. "Lee's life for Lies" is a curious exception.

The desricription of this clip by YouTube uploader "tamerghonym" claims that it's "A Message from a US soldier in Iraq Lee K. Tucker to his family. The message was found in a flash memory after his Humvee had been attacked by the Islamic Army in Iraq." The footage of Tucker, along with a recorded letter he wrote to his parents, implies that Lee was against the war. It also implies that he died when his Humvee was blown up.

The problem is that Lee is alive and well. And he almost certainly never wrote or recorded the letter. The footage of him and his fellow soldiers was either stolen or found, and then manipulated to make it seem genuine. (The other four parts can be viewed on tamerghonym's YouTube channel while it's still up.)

From San Francisco's CBS 5 News comes the revelation that the Pentagon once investigated the possibility of developing a bomb that would turn enemy soldiers gay. No, really. An Air Force lab sent a proposal to the Pentagon which suggested weaponizing "strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior." In other words -- to distill what I'm sure was an incredibly sophisticated thought process -- the plan was to develop some sort of powerful gay-i-fying juice and spray it all over enemy troops. Then, as said troops became distracted and weakened from their compulsive buggering of one another, we would seize military victory and sail to glory.

No, really.

There's also an interview with a gay woman saying that the proposal's implication -- that gay behavior is a "distasteful" thing -- is offensive. Me, I wonder how offensive any American might find it that our military seems to be lifting its weaponization strategy from discarded "South Park" concepts. I mean... come on... really?