"Iranians are laughing about it. In the orchard around Saddam's hideout, the dates are on the trees!.  Everyone in Iran knows that dates are harvested in the hottest part of August.  The dates on the trees and the color of the trees tell us the photos of Saddam's hideout were taken in summer.  This is late autumn".

The foilage in the photos of "Saddam's Hideout" are in summer-color

Photo obtained from Free Republic -
by Axis Researcher, Kevin Brooke)

My Iranian friend's assertions appear to be confirmed by no less than the United States Marine Corps, itself.  Spc. Melissa Walther, reporting for the Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq reported:  

"As the hot afternoon sun blazed down from an intense, blue sky Aug. 5, military members of the Humanitarian Aid Coordination Center took part in an ancient tradition of the Middle East: the Date Harvest."

On August 11, 2003, The Coalition Joint Task Force Seven also reported their participation in the August date harvest:

"The dates are harvested every two to three days and are taken directly to the local market to be sold, or are dried in the sun and sold as an export product."

In Oil Overshadows Iraq's Sweetest Crop on August 9, 2003, -Agricultural Pioneer reported:

"Taleb Obaid shakes his head at the withered bunches of dates hanging from palm trees at his plantation on the banks of the Euphrates River, in one of Iraq's most important date-growing regions. "The insects have ruined my dates this year," Obaid says, pointing to wispy strands in trees that should be sagging under a heavy load of ripening fruit, but now flutter in the hot breeze. 'I'm worried about the future for me and the other farmers around here who depend on dates for their living.' Obaid's 150 trees, nurtured from saplings he planted 20 years ago, will this year yield 10 metric tons, around a third of a good harvest. That mirrors the damage to the nation's crop overall. War interrupted the seasonal routine of pollination, aerial pesticide spraying and irrigation." [the effects of the U.S. war on Iraq's number 2 money-crop is another story, but the time of harvest is again, confirmed by Ag-Pioneer.

In A Destiny With Dates on July 28, 2003, Terry McDermott wrote for the LATimes:

"ABU AL KHASIB, Iraq--In the basin of the Shatt al Arab waterway, it's 90 degrees at dawn and rising. They call these midsummer weeks in southern Iraq the palm oven days because it's in the intense heat of July that the sweetness of autumn is made -- the dates cook, the sugars burn and the flavor cures. Kamal Ayoob Khaleel, one man alone against an orchard of a couple of hundred trees, has this day begun the year's date palm harvest, the first of the post-Saddam Hussein era."

But the date trees in the U.S. Military's photos of "Saddam's Hideout" are only the beginning of the story that could wreck the Neocon/Bush regimes nefarious plans for the Middle East.

But there is more ... much more ...