Global Eye

Hard Reign

By Chris Floyd
Published: July 23, 2004

The dictator walked into the prison courtyard, his entourage of government officials and foreign bodyguards scurrying around him. A crowd of policemen had gathered there to hear the Leader speak. Under the blinding fury of the desert sun, he ordered them to strike without mercy at the enemies of the state -- and to fear no retribution should their zealotry devour the innocent with the guilty. He would shield them from the law, he said.

Then the entourage came upon seven prisoners, bound and blindfolded, lined up against a wall. These are terrorists, the interior minister declared. "They should be killed on the spot!" The Leader nodded, his great jowled face set in a grim mask. "They deserve worse than death," he said, before pulling the pistol from his belt. He shot each man in the head, moving down the line quickly, efficiently, with the practiced motions of an old assassin. In a moment, six lay dead on the burning dust; the seventh, who'd struggled against his bonds in the tumult, fell mortally wounded beside them.

"God be praised!" cried the interior minister, as the Leader's bodyguards tossed the dead men into the back of a pickup truck. Within hours, the story had spread through the capital: A hard man was now in charge; the iron hand had come again. The bodies were buried in the desert wastes near the torture center of Abu Ghraib.

That's how ex-Baathist enforcer and CIA-backed terrorist leader Iyad Allawi began the process of "legitimizing" his rule over the Iraqi people, the Sydney Morning Herald reported last week. Three weeks after the American conquerors placed the unelected Allawi in charge of the interim government -- and scant days before George W. Bush viceroy Paul Bremer made his huggermugger handover of sham sovereignty to a clique of American-appointed factota -- Allawi blew the brains out of the chained men at Baghdad's Al-Almariyah security center.

The mass murder was confirmed by eyewitnesses, interviewed independently by veteran reporter Paul McGeough. He found the sources, separately, on his own -- they weren't thrown in his way by intriguers from the factota's savage infighting over power and loot. Indeed, far from condemning the summary execution of the untried prisoners, the eyewitnesses heartily approved of the killings -- which were also seen by at least four U.S. Special Forces troops from Allawi's personal bodyguard.

Although Allawi and his American keepers shrugged off the charges, the paper's chain of evidence for the story is considerably stronger than the fantasies and fabrications used by the Christian Coalition of Bush and Tony Blair to con their nations into a war of aggression. In recent days, their "case" for war has been ripped to shreds by panels of Establishment worthies in both the United States and Britain -- albeit with copious amounts of butt-covering waffle and partisan PR. But the actual facts buried underneath the high-toned harrumphing leave no doubt that both leaders deliberately and willingly manipulated the caveat-laden assessments of their intelligence services in order to whip up a war fever based on threats that they knew were exaggerated or nonexistent.

And why did they do this? So they could install someone exactly like Allawi into power in Iraq: a Saddam Hussein-like thug, a hitman willing to slaughter his own people, a useful tool for creating a pliable client state and for establishing a permanent military presence to "project dominance" over the world's dwindling oil reserves and vital supply lines. None of this is a secret; Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, the Bushes and their minions have been talking about it openly for more than a decade. As we've often reported here, their group, Project for the New American Century, published a virtual blueprint of Bush's imperial foreign policy back in September 2000 -- even mentioning the possibility of a "new Pearl Harbor" that could "catalyze" the American public into backing the group's far-reaching ambitions. A linchpin of the plan was the military takeover of Iraq -- even if Hussein was no longer in power, as the PNAC document cheerfully admitted.

All that was required was a murderous stooge to keep the locals screwed down tight -- and to provide a fig leaf of sovereignty for the propaganda aimed at the rubes back in the Homeland. Allawi was made to measure for the part. He began his career as a gun-toting assassin for the Baath Party, The New Yorker reports, helping Hussein's bloody rise to power. Allawi then went to London, where he acted as Hussein's spy -- and enforcer -- on Iraqis living abroad. For reasons yet unclear, the two thugs had a falling out -- or perhaps Allawi got a better offer from British intelligence.

At any rate, he was London's man until 1991, when the CIA made it a threesome, bankrolling his terrorist operations in Iraq. Allawi's bombs killed dozens of civilians -- but were curiously ineffective at hampering the operations of his former Baathist blood brother. He was also one of the chief purveyors of phony WMD baloney in the run-up to war, along with his cousin and rival, Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon-backed fraudster whom Allawi pipped at the post to seize the flunky's crown.

Now Allawi sits on Hussein's throne, supported by the same men who once backed the jailed tyrant: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, the Bushes. He's establishing a new Security Directorate, drawing from the poisoned well of Hussein's evil Mukhabarat. And just like Hussein, Allawi is "legitimizing" his position as top "hard man" with hands-on murder. The brutal comedy goes on, with the same players, the same dead pieties masking the same brutal ambitions, and the same, never-changing results: ruin, rage and death.

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