(TMPress International – New York – June 25, 2004) – Who Is Iraq's New Prime Minister, Dr. Iyad Allawi? … Mr. Allawi is the new interim Prime Minister-Designate of Iraq. A supposed prominent Iraqi Exile and neurologist working in Britain, Allawi is a former Ba'athist and supporter of Saddam Hussein's government. Allawi was born in 1945 to a prominent Iraqi Shi'a family; his grandfather helped to negotiate Iraq's independence from Britain, and his father was an MP (Member of Parliament). In the 1960s, he studied at medical school in Baghdad, where he first met Saddam Hussein.
His early political career, according to the memoirs of Talib Shabib, began around 1963, as an assassin for Saddam's hated and much feared Mukhabarat, or the famous Iraqi secret police. Dr. Allawi was an active supporter of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party and Saddam in the 1960s and early 1970s and it is this `role as a Ba'ath Party operative, while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies that one needs to examine … and as Saddam became President in 1979, that is much less well known. According to a new piece this week … `The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh' … `Allawi helped Saddam get to power,' as described to Hersh by an American intelligence officer. And according to that operative, `He was a very effective operator and a true believer.' Seymour Hersh adds that Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer who served in the Middle East, added to Allawi's credentials, `He likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug.'
Also according to Hersh, early this year, one of Allawi’s former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a `big husky man … who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students.' `Allawi’s medical degree, she wrote, `was conferred upon him by the Ba'ath party.' Hersh reports, that Allawi moved to London in 1971, not to exile as has been reported in the mainstream press – and ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Ba’ath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975. Hersh states, that she is quoted as saying, `If you’re asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does,' … Hersh quotes Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA officer, as saying, `He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff.' In addition a cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi’s personal history, according to The New Yorker's Hersh … stated early this month, `That Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat `hit team' that sought out and killed Ba'ath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi’s office did not respond to The New Yorker's Hersh … to a request for comment). At some point, according to Hersh – around 1975, and for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor and Ba'athist Agents 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 yearlong hospital stay.
...According to former CIA officers, Allawi's INA organized terrorist attacks in Iraq between 1992 through 1995, and including an apparent bombing of a school bus that killed many Iraqi school children.
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http://www.williambowles.info/iraq/who_is_allawi.htmlDid he bomb his own people?
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