Doug Lorimer
Bakhtiar Amin, human rights minister in Washington's puppet Interim Government of Iraq, announced on July 19 that he would investigate a report carried exclusively by the July 17 Sydney Morning Herald that the IGI's prime minister, Iyad Allawi, shot dead six Iraqi prisoners three weeks earlier.
SMH Baghdad correspondent Paul McGeough reported that two eyewitnesses had told him: "The prisoners — handcuffed and blindfolded — were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al Amariyah security centre", in Baghdad's south-western suburbs. They told McGeough that Allawi shot each young man in the head as a dozen Iraqi police officers and Allawi's four US bodyguards "watched in stunned silence".
"This is not the Iyad Allawi that I know", said Amin. "He's not a killer. And he's not the type of person who goes out killing people."
However, according to the memoirs of former Iraqi foreign minister Talib Shabib, who went into exile in 1976 and who died in 1997, Allawi began his "political" career around 1963 as an assassin for the Mukhabarat, the Baathist regime's secret police.
In an article carried by the June 19 New Yorker magazine, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Allawi had been an active supporter of Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, assisting his rise to power within the Baathist regime. "Allawi helped Saddam get to power", a US intelligence officer told Hersh.
Dr Haifa al Azawi, a California-based gynaecologist and a US citizen who went to medical school with Allawi in Baghdad in the 1960s, remembered Allawi as "the Baath party union leader, who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it terrorising the medical students, was a poor student and chose to spend his time standing in the school courtyard or chasing female students to their homes. His medical degree is bogus and was conferred upon him by the Baath Party, soon after a World Health Organisation grant was orchestrated for him to go to England [in 1971] and study public health accompanied by his Christian wife, whom he dumped later to marry a Muslim woman.
"In England he was a poor student, visiting the Iraqi embassy at the end of each month to collect his salary as the Baath Party representative. According to his first wife and her family members, he spent his time dealing with assassins doing the dirty work for the Iraqi government, until his time was up and he became their target."
This allegation, that Allawi went to London to take charge of the European operations of the Mukhabarat, was backed up by Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA officer, who told Hersh: "He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff."
Hersh reported that a "Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the US indifference to Allawi's personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat 'hit team' that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi's office did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay."
According to a June 9 New York Times report, Allawi was placed on the CIA's payroll in 1992, and set up the CIA-backed Iraqi National Accord (INA) organisation with Iraqi military and Mukhabarat officers who had fled into exile after the 1991 Gulf War.
Former CIA officers told the New York Times that Allawi's INA organised terrorist attacks inside Iraq between 1992 through 1995, including the bombing of a school bus that killed many schoolchildren.
He "was highly regarded by those involved in Iraqi operations", Samuel Berger, who was national security adviser in the Clinton administration, told the NY Times.
Hersh reported that Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer who served in the Middle East, said that Allawi's "strongest virtue is that he's a thug".
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, July 28, 2004.
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