This has gotten nutty. Everything Fifa does as an international body is kinda wacky, but they are topping themsevles day by day.

The latest: Fifa is calling on presidential candidate Mohamed bin Hammam and fellow executive committee member Jack Warner to speak at an investigate hearing into possible bribery.

This has to do with the upcoming election for president. Mohamed bin Hammam, from Qatar, is running against Sepp Blatter, and it’s getting ugly. Uglier.

What in the Sam Hill is going on here?

Here is the story I did for The National’s Thursday newspaper. I gave a local spin to an international story — the Carlo Nohra I referred to in on this blog yesterday simply doesn’t believe bin Hammam is crooked.

Somebody, however, clearly is.

Here are the weirdnesses:

–Jack Warner historically has been very tight with Sepp Blatter, as well as with Chuck Blazer, who works with him in Concacaf. Yet Blazer is saying Warner is bent.

–Four continental federations have endorsed Blatter in the election coming on Wednesday, June 1. The exceptions are the Asian Football Confederation, of which bin Hammam is president, and Concacacf, of which Warner is president. That failure to endorse Sepp at the Concacaf meeting early this month is weird and perhaps is an indicated that Jack Warner was prepared to flip to bin Hammam and take much of the Concacaf bloc with him, which represents 35 of the 208 voting members.

–We’ve got a local authority, here in the UAE, vouching for bin Hammam’s character and integrity. Yet we have bin Hammam caught up in this Trinidad thing with Warner (Blazer says), and he is from Qatar, which may have gotten the 2022 World Cup through unfair means.

–Bin Hammam supporters are not wrong out of line in suggesting all these “revelations” about bin Hammam and Qatar coming out in the days before the election are suspicious. They are.

What we will soon find out is whether all the allegations destroy the bin Hammam presidential bid … or whether all this leakage and whisper campaigns will drive even more national associations away from Blatter because they associate him with dirty tricks in this campaign.

Just a ultra-strange story. It’s very difficult to figure out who is double-crossing whom … all we know is that the infighting is reaching epic proportions.

To see all of bin Hammam’s remarks insisting on his innocence, here is the pertinent blog entry.