Posted 6:25 AM by Dil
http://www.emjournal.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/aajune007.html
 
http://www.independentbias.com/iyad_allawi.htm
 
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Iyad-Allawi
v good biography of allawi
 
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1163935/posts
allawi friend UK ambassador

Posted 6:16 AM by Dil
Prime Minister of Terror: Who is Allawi?
Ghali Hassan June 21 2004
On 30 June 2004, Mr. Iyad Allawi will switch his position from the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) to be come the Iraq’s new Prime Minister in the new named Iraqi Interim Government (IIG), another creature of the U.S. Nothing will change for the Iraqi People. The Iraqi people are very sceptical and despised those expatriates the U.S. piggybacked to Baghdad. For Mr. Allawi and his clique, they will be richer and brutal. Mr. Allawi will appear on American TV screens as often as possible, simply to legitimise the occupation of Iraq.
Mr. Allawi is a secular of prominent Moslem merchant family. He was a former member of the Baath Party underground movement, and was in Saddam’s regime unti1 1979. His wealthy family was close to the royal family that ruled before Saddam Hussein took power. After falling out of favour with Saddam, Allawi sought exile in London, where he developed a relationship with Britain's MI-6 intelligence service during the 1980s, and eventually he also formed a relationship with the CIA. Allawi and Chalabi are related by marriage, have been alternately rivals and allies. Chalabi had a bitter break-up with the CIA in the 1990s but became close with the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Allawi and his Iraqi National Accord (INA) organization have solid relationships with the CIA and State Department.
In 1991, Allawi with Salih Omar Ali Al-Tikriti founded the INA as an opposition to Saddam’s Baath Party. Both were ex-Baathist and former supporters of Saddam’s regime. Salih Al-Tikriti viewed as unsavoury by the U.S. The INA constituted of disillusioned former Baathists from the military and security fields. With support from the CIA and MI-6, the INA instigated a coup d’étate within the Iraqi Army, the attempt ended disastrously. In London, Allawi’s job was to keep an eye on Iraqi students studying in the UK. After moving to London in 1971 as a medical student he received payment from the Iraqi embassy there. It is also alleged that he did not quit the Baath party until 1975, and that he escaped an assassination attempt on his life in 1978.
According to Patrick Cockburn of The Independent of London, “[Allawi] is the person through whom the controversial claim was channelled that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be operational in 45 minutes”. This lie, helped prepare the British citizens to support Tony Blair messianic war on Iraq. In January 2004 a New York spokesman for Allawi acknowledged this was in fact “a crock of shit.” Almost sounds like the new Prime Minister has learned his skill of lying from his masters in London and Washington.
The Iraqi Girl Blog, Baghdad Burning, wrote on 18 June 2002: “Iyad Allawi is completely America and Britain’s boy. He has been on the CIA’s payroll for quite some time now and I don’t think anyone was particularly surprised when he was made Prime Minister. The cabinet of ministers is an interesting concoction of exiled Iraqis, Kurdish Iraqis who were in the northern region and a few Iraqis who were actually living inside of Iraq”.
Like Chalabi, Allawi too was appointed to the IGC. He has been responsible for overseeing the council's security committee of the IGC. His position in the IGC was to recruit new army, police and intelligent members, a job he had under Saddam. Allawi was a member of Hunein, a security apparatus headed by Saddam Hussein. He has always opposed to the purging of members of the Baath party from senior government posts. I wonder if Mr. Allawi is not able to resurrect some of “Saddam’s doubles”. The mainstream media and particularly the BBC used to be obsessed with Saddam’s doubles. Where on earth are Saddam’s famed look-alikes?
The choice of Iyad Allawi as Iraq’s prime minister of the upcoming IIG was “forced by the United States as a fait accompli on the UN and the Iraqi people. He was an American candidate than one of the UN or the Iraqis themselves. “When we first heard the news today, we thought that the [IGC] had hijacked the process”, a senior U.N. official said. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy to Iraq resigned as a result of his failure to stand up to the U.S. and show some credibility in Iraq. Once again, the UN failed the Iraqi people and denied them their legitimate human rights. Allawi’s choice and his close ties with the U.S. came in a country where public opinion has grown almost universally hostile to the Americans. Recent polls reveal that Mr. Allawi has almost 5 percent supports, just below the president, with a 7 percent approval rating.
In Washington and London, Mr. Allawi is well connected, but in Iraq everyone mistrusts Mr Allawi. Extensive PR campaign last year to built support in Washington rather than in Baghdad seemed to pay off. Danielle Pletka, a Middle East analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, said: “It was a bid for influence, and it was money well spent”. "Allawi has always assumed, in many ways correctly, that he didn't need a constituency in Iraq as long as he had one in Washington”, Pletka added.
According to report by Jim Drinkard of USA Today: “Lobbying records show that the law firm of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds and the New York public relations firm of Brown Lloyd James engaged in a flurry of contacts on Allawi's behalf beginning in late October. Most were aimed at setting up meetings with influential members of Congress and their staffs, administration officials, think tanks and journalists”. The money paid by a wealthy Iraqi expatriate in London.
Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, a California-based gynaecologist and a U.S. citizen who went to school with Allawi in Baghdad in the 1960s, remembered Mr. Allawi as: “big, husky man. The Baath party union leader, who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it terrorizing 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 Organization (WHO) grant was orchestrated for him to go to England 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”. It is not uncommon in Iraq during the Baath Party rule to give special favours for those who choose to serve its agenda.
A report in The New York Times described the INA (funded by the CIA of course), as “a terrorist organization. In the early 1990's the INA sent agents into Baghdad to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say, they also bombed movie theatres and school buses full of children”. Furthermore, the Times reported “[i] n 1996, Amneh al-Khadami, who described himself as the chief bomb maker for the Iraqi National Accord and as being based in Sulaimaniya, in northern Iraq, recorded a videotape in which he talked of the bombing campaign and complained that he was being short-changed money and supplies. Two former intelligence officers confirmed the existence of the videotape.”[W]e blew up a car, and we were supposed to get $2,000 but got only $1,000’ Mr. Khadami alleged told The Independent in 1997”. Who the Americans are fighting in their “war on terror”?
The Iraqi born novelist and artist, Haifa Zangana wrote in The Guardian of London: “The CPA also ignores the violent activities of the four militias in Iraq, which have taken the law into their own hands: the peshmergas of the two Kurdish parties; the Badr brigade of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq; Ahmed Chalabi's troops; and the ex-Ba'athist Mukhabarats under Iyad A[l]lawi's national accord. These militias are run by members of the IGC and no one can touch them. No high-ranking official of Saddam's regime has yet been prosecuted either, despite the wish of most Iraqis that they be bought to justice”.
In September 2003, Akila Al-Hashimi, a female member of the council, was shot and died later of her wounds. A rotating president of the U.S.-appointed council was assassinated on May 17 in a car-bomb attack on his convoy west of Baghdad. At least 1000 professionals and intellectuals have been murdered. “Many academics fear a deliberate brain drain is now being executed through murder. The mukhabarat (secret intelligence) of all the surrounding countries are active here: Mossad, the Iranians, Turks, Kuwaitis, Jordanians, Syrians,” said an unnamed academic. “They are settling scores with each other, with the Americans and the Americans with them”. “Why are they still detaining university professors if they are re-analysing their own intelligence on whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction?” Gulshan Husayn, wife of Dr Ali al-Zaak, detained dean of Genetic Engineering at Baghdad University told Al-Jazeera.
The U.S. is not interested in genuine democracy, the democracy of one citizen, one vote. In fact, the U.S. refused to allow local elections in Iraq last summer. The U.S. administration is interested in a U.S-controlled democracy. The kind of democracy enforced on the people of Latin America. In Allawi’s Iraq, if he survived, elections will be an open contest but that candidates have to be vetted in an opaque process achieved by the return of many thugs of the old regime.
After more than thirty years in exile (London and Washington) and a “bogus” medical degree, the Iraqi people expected “their” Prime Minister to speak their language, not broken English. Unfortunately, Dr. Allawi has failed the Iraqi people. How can Dr. Allawi and those around him watch their compatriots (the Iraqi people) abused, tortured, raped and murdered by the same occupying forces they are collaborating with. He should learn to speak the language of the vast majority of the Iraqi people. He should learn to say: End the occupation; free the Iraqi people from America’s violent militarism.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2004/062104whoisallawi.htm
 

Posted 6:08 AM by Dil
Exiled Allawi was Responsible for 45-Minute WMD Claim


by Patrick Cockburn

 


The choice of Iyad Allawi, closely linked to the CIA and formerly to MI6, as the Prime Minister of Iraq from 30 June will make it difficult for the US and Britain to persuade the rest of the world that he is capable of leading an independent government.




Iyad Allawi, a former member of Saddam Hussein 's Baath party who worked with the CIA to topple him, was chosen as prime minister of Iraq May 28, 2004. (Sergio Perez/Reuters) He is the person through whom the controversial claim was channeled that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be operational in 45 minutes.
Dr Allawi, aged 59, who trained as a neurologist, is a Shia Muslim who was a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath party in Iraq and in Britain, where he was a student leader with links to Iraqi intelligence. He later moved into opposition to the Iraqi leader and reportedly established a connection with the British security services. His change of allegiance led to Dr Allawi being targeted by Iraqi intelligence. In 1978 their agents armed with knives and axes badly wounded him when they attacked him as he lay asleep in bed in his house in Kingston-upon-Thames.
Dr Allawi became a businessman with contacts in Saudi Arabia. He was charming, intelligent and had a gift for impressing Western intelligence agencies. After the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraq National Accord (INA) party, which he helped to found, became one of the building blocks for the Iraqi opposition in exile. The organization attracted former Iraqi army officers and Baath party officials, particularly Sunni Arabs, fleeing Iraq.
In the mid-1990s the INA claimed to have extensive contacts in the Iraqi officer corps. Dr Allawi began to move from the orbit of MI6 to the CIA. He persuaded his new masters that he was in a position to organize a military coup in Baghdad.
With American, British and Saudi support, he opened a headquarters and a radio station in Amman in Jordan in 1996, declaring it was "a historic moment for the Iraqi opposition". After a failed coup attempt that year there were mass arrests in Baghdad. Abdul-Karim al-Kabariti, the Jordanian prime minister of the day, said that INA's networks were "all penetrated by the Iraqi security services".
Dr Allawi and the INA returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam and set up offices in Baghdad and in old Baath party offices throughout Iraq.
There were few signs that they had any popular support. During an uprising in the town of Baiji, north of Baghdad, last year, crowds immediately set fire to the INA office.
Dr Allawi was head of the security committee of the Iraqi Governing Council and was opposed to the dissolution of the army by Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. He stepped down in protest as head of the committee during the US assault on Fallujah. But his reputation among Iraqis for working first with Saddam's intelligence agents and then with MI6 and the CIA may make it impossible for them to accept him as leader of an independent Iraq.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0529-02.htm
 

Posted 5:17 AM by Dil
Allawi shot prisoners in cold blood: witnesses

By Paul McGeough in Baghdad
July 17, 2004
Paul McGeough:
 
Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.
They say 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 the city's south-western suburbs.
They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they "deserved worse than death".
The Prime Minister's office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.
But the informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the Prime Minister's personal security team watched in stunned silence.

Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, is said to have looked on and congratulated him when the job was done. Mr al-Naqib's office has issued a verbal denial.
The names of three of the alleged victims have been obtained by the Herald.
One of the witnesses claimed that before killing the prisoners Dr Allawi had told those around him that he wanted to send a clear message to the police on how to deal with insurgents.
"The prisoners were against the wall and we were standing in the courtyard when the Interior Minister said that he would like to kill them all on the spot. Allawi said that they deserved worse than death - but then he pulled the pistol from his belt and started shooting them."
Re-enacting the killings, one witness stood three to four metres in front of a wall and swung his outstretched arm in an even arc, left to right, jerking his wrist to mimic the recoil as each bullet was fired. Then he raised a hand to his brow, saying: "He was very close. Each was shot in the head."
The prisoners were against the wall and we were standing in the courtyard when the Interior Minister said that he would like to kill them all on the spot. Allawi said that they deserved worse than death - but then he pulled the pistol from his belt and started shooting them.
The witnesses said seven prisoners had been brought out to the courtyard, but the last man in the line was only wounded - in the neck, said one witness; in the chest, said the other.
Given Dr Allawi's role as the leader of the US experiment in planting a model democracy in the Middle East, allegations of a return to the cold-blooded tactics of his predecessor are likely to stir a simmering debate on how well Washington knows its man in Baghdad, and precisely what he envisages for the new Iraq.
There is much debate and rumour in Baghdad about the Prime Minister's capacity for brutality, but this is the first time eyewitness accounts have been obtained.
A former CIA officer, Vincent Cannisatraro, recently told The New Yorker: "If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does. He was a paid Mukhabarat [intelligence] agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff."
In Baghdad, varying accounts of the shootings are interpreted by observers as useful to a little-known politician who, after 33 years in exile, needs to prove his leadership credentials as a "strongman" in a war-ravaged country that has no experience of democracy.
Dr Allawi's statement dismissed the allegations as rumours instigated by enemies of his interim government.
But in a sharp reminder of the Iraqi hunger for security above all else, the witnesses did not perceive themselves as whistle-blowers. In interviews with the Herald they were enthusiastic about such killings, with one of them arguing: "These criminals were terrorists. They are the ones who plant the bombs."
Before the shootings, the 58-year-old Prime Minister is said to have told the policemen they must have courage in their work and that he would shield them from any repercussions if they killed insurgents in the course of their duty.
The witnesses said the Iraqi police observers were "shocked and surprised". But asked what message they might take from such an act, one said: "Any terrorists in Iraq should have the same destiny. This is the new Iraq.
"Allawi wanted to send a message to his policemen and soldiers not to be scared if they kill anyone - especially, they are not to worry about tribal revenge. He said there would be an order from him and the Interior Ministry that all would be fully protected.
"He told them: 'We must destroy anyone who wants to destroy Iraq and kill our people.'
"At first they were surprised. I was scared - but now the police seem to be very happy about this. There was no anger at all, because so many policemen have been killed by these criminals."
Dr Allawi had made a surprise visit to the complex, they said.
Neither witness could give a specific date for the killings. But their accounts narrowed the time frame to on or around the third weekend in June - about a week before the rushed handover of power in Iraq and more than three weeks after Dr Allawi was named as the interim Prime Minister.
They said that as many as five of the dead prisoners were Iraqis, two of whom came from Samarra, a volatile town to the north of the capital, where an attack by insurgents on the home of Mr Al-Naqib killed four of the Interior Minister's bodyguards on June 19.
The Herald has established the names of three of the prisoners alleged to have been killed. Two names connote ties to Syrian-based Arab tribes, suggesting they were foreign fighters: Ahmed Abdulah Ahsamey and Amer Lutfi Mohammed Ahmed al-Kutsia.
The third was Walid Mehdi Ahmed al-Samarrai. The last word of his name indicates that he was one of the two said to come from Samarra, which is in the Sunni Triangle.
The three names were provided to the Interior Ministry, where senior adviser Sabah Khadum undertook to provide a status report on each. He was asked if they were prisoners, were they alive or had they died in custody.
But the next day he cut short an interview by hanging up the phone, saying only: "I have no information - I don't want to comment on that specific matter."
All seven were described as young men. One of the witnesses spoke of the distinctive appearance of four as "Wahabbi", the colloquial Iraqi term for the foreign fundamentalist insurgency fighters and their Iraqi followers.
He said: "The Wahabbis had long beards, very short hair and they were wearing dishdashas [the caftan-like garment worn by Iraqi men]."
Raising the hem of his own dishdasha to reveal the cotton pantaloons usually worn beneath, he said: "The other three were just wearing these - they looked normal."
One witness justified the shootings as an unintended act of mercy: "They were happy to die because they had already been beaten by the police for two to eight hours a day to make them talk."
After the removal of the bodies, the officer in charge of the complex, General Raad Abdullah, is said to have called a meeting of the policemen and told them not to talk outside the station about what had happened. "He said it was a security issue," a witness said.
One of the Al-Amariyah witnesses said he watched as Iraqis among the Prime Minister's bodyguards piled the prisoners' bodies into the back of a Nissan utility and drove off. He did not know what became of them. But the other witness said the bodies were buried west of Baghdad, in open desert country near Abu Ghraib.
That would place their burial near the notorious prison, which was used by Saddam Hussein's security forces to torture and kill thousands of Iraqis. Subsequently it was revealed as the setting for the still-unfolding prisoner abuse scandal involving US troops in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad.
The Herald has established that as many as 30 people, including the victims, may have been in the courtyard. One of the witnesses said there were five or six civilian-clad American security men in a convoy of five or six late model four-wheel-drive vehicles that was shepherding Dr Allawi's entourage on the day. The US military and Dr Allawi's office refused to respond to questions about the composition of his security team. It is understood that the core of his protection unit is drawn from the US Special Forces units.
The security establishment where the killings are said to have happened is on open ground on the border of the Al-Amariyah and Al-Kudra neighbourhoods in Baghdad.
About 90 policemen are stationed at the complex, which processes insurgents and more hardened offenders among those captured in the struggle against a wave of murder, robbery and kidnapping in post-invasion Iraq.
The Interior Ministry denied permission for the Herald to enter the heavily fortified police complex.
The two witnesses were independently and separately found by the Herald. Neither approached the newspaper. They were interviewed on different days in a private home in Baghdad, without being told the other had spoken. A condition of the co-operation of each man was that no personal information would be published.
Both interviews lasted more than 90 minutes and were conducted through an interpreter, with another journalist present for one of the meetings. The witnesses were not paid for the interviews.
Dr Allawi's office has dismissed the allegations as rumours instigated by enemies of his interim government.
A statement in the name of spokesman Taha Hussein read: "We face these sorts of allegations on a regular basis. Numerous groups are attempting to hinder what the interim Iraqi government is on the verge of achieving, and occasionally they spread outrageous accusations hoping they will be believed and thus harm the honourable reputation of those who sacrifice so much to protect this glorious country and its now free and respectable people.
"Dr Allawi is turning this country into a free and democratic nation run by the rule of law; so if your sources are as credible as they say they are, then they are more than welcome to file a complaint in a court of law against the Prime Minister."
In response to a question asking if Dr Allawi carried a gun, the statement said: "[He] does not carry a pistol. He is the Prime Minister of Iraq, not a combatant in need of any weaponry."
Sabah Khadum, a senior adviser to Interior Minister Mr Naqib, whose portfolio covers police matters, also dismissed the accounts. Rejecting them as "ludicrous", Mr Khadum said of Dr Allawi: "He is a doctor and I know him. He was my neighbour in London. He just doesn't have it in him. Baghdad is a city of rumours. This is not worth discussing."
Mr Khadum added: "Do you think a man who is Prime Minister is going to disqualify himself for life like this? This is not a government of gangsters."
Asked if Dr Allawi had visited the Al-Amariyah complex - one of the most important counter-insurgency centres in Baghdad - Mr Khadum said he could not reveal the Prime Minister's movements. But he added: "Dr Allawi has made many visits to police stations ... he is heading the offensive."
US officials in Iraq have not made an outright denial of the allegations. An emailed response to questions from the Herald to the US ambassador, John Negroponte, said: "If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, this case is closed."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/16/1089694568757.html?oneclick=true