Qaddafi's reading list: Obama, Tom Friedman, Fareed Zakaria

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi is an "avid consumer of television and print media" who made a top Libyan diplomat read and summarize well-known current events books, according to an American diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks.

According to the Oct. 20, 2008 cable, Qaddafi asked Dr. Ahmed Fituri to write four to seven-page Arabic summaries of several "significant" English-language books each year dealing with U.S. politics and policy, current events and history.

Fituri, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Secretary for the Americas, holds a PhD from the University of Michigan.

"Fituri estimated that he has summarized six to eight books per year, as well as miscellaneous articles from key journals and magazines," the confidential cable noted, adding that other diplomats were asked to do similar translations for non-English books.

Qaddafi's reading list might easily have been confused with a list of frequent "Daily Show" guests:

"[Fituri] was currently summarizing Fareed Zakaria's latest book, 'The Post-American World' and was about to begin work on Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat 3.0'. He had recently translated in full the [then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's] article in the Foreign Affairs journal," wrote U.S. embassy Tripoli Charge d'Affaires Chris Stevens.

Also on Qaddafi's list: Zakaria's "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad," which the cable notes that "Qaddafi liked"; George Soros' "The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror"; and "The Audacity of Hope" by an occasional book author known as Barack Obama.

Earlier:

Another American diplomat noticed the books on Fituri's desk during a meeting, and Fituri seemed happy to talk about "the Leader's" reding preferences. (No mention of the "Twilight" books, though.)

The bad news for Libyan bibliophiles is that Qaddafi's reading has dropped of precipitously in recent years, perhaps due to a (reported) series of minor strokes suffered in 2008.

Worse still, Qaddafi and a top security official, Musa Kusa, had ordered a similar program of "Reader's Digest" summaries to be produced for son Muatassim Qaddafi, but Kusa found the young Qaddafi was "not an avid reader" and "had to be prodded to read even summaries."

Fituri goes on to suggest that Muatassim is widely thought of as not being the sharpest tack in the Libyan box, but adds -- presumably in an effort not to be strung up for heresy -- that Muatassim has "his own strengths."