Hard To Know Which Side To Root For

Ayman al-Zawahiri is Osama bin Laden's number two in al Qaeda. In 1995 (when he was still running his own organization, called al-Jihad) he attempted to assassinate Hosni Mubarak when Mubarak visited Ethiopia. Here's how Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower, describes the Egyptian government's response when the plot failed:

To deal with Zawahiri, Egyptian intelligence agents devised a fiendish plan. They lured a thirteen year-old boy named Ahmed into an apartment with the promise of juice and videos. Ahmed was the son of Mohammed Sharraf, a well-known Egyptian fundamentalist and a senior member of al-Jihad. The boy was drugged and sodomized; when he awakened, he was confronted with photographs of the homosexual activity and threatened with the prospect of having them shown to his father. For the child, the consequences of such a disclosure were overwhelming. "It could even be that the father would kill him," a source close to Zawahiri admitted.

Next the Egyptian agents got the first boy to lure in a second, whom they also drugged and raped. Then they got the two to spy on Zawahiri in an attempt to kill him. Then Zawahiri caught the two boys spying. And then he had them both shot.

AND OF COURSE: A jolly picture of Bush and Mubarak holding hands and grinning is available here.