Bob's Links and Rants


Saturday, September 25, 2004

Comical Allawi--the Resume

Ken Layne has it. Excerpts:
Allawi, a secular Shiite from a wealthy merchant family, was a spy and -- maybe! -- assassin for Saddam Hussein. As a high-ranking officer in the dreaded Mukharabat, the Ba'athist secret police, he was Saddam's friend, colleague and eventual rival. His Baghdad medical degree is said to be phony; the Ba'ath Party gave it to him so he could travel Europe on a World Health Organization grant and infiltrate Arab student groups.

Dr Haifa al-Azzawi knew Allawi well in his youth: "No one who studied medicine in Baghdad in the 60s could have forgotten that Ba'athist bully boy. He walked around the campus with a pistol in his belt and chased women students. His medical degree is bogus."
It has long been known that he works every side: MI6, the Ba'ath Party, CIA, UN, Saudi intel, Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, oil companies in the region (where he made his personal fortune), Allawi's own Iraqi National Accord, etc. He was supposed to lead a coup against Saddam in 1995 or 1996 (dates vary), backed by Clinton's White House. It was a $40-million operation, with support from the CIA and several MidEast states. Allawi blabbed to the Washington Post that a coup was on the way. This got back to Saddam very quickly, and Saddam tortured and murdered 800+ army officers believed to have some link to Allawi.

Allawi also headed a CIA-financed terrorist group operating within Iraq.. It was responsible for a number of terror attacks in the mid-1990s, including the bombing of a movie theater full of people, newspaper offices and public buses, as well as the usual car bombings. (Yes, he's a terrorist, but he's our terrorist. For now, at least.)

In 2002, Allawi played his crucial role in the war buildup by delivering a frightening (and fake) report to British Intelligence. The report, allegedly from an Iraqi officer, claimed that Saddam could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes.
Sounds like W's kind of guy!