Iraq’s new prime minister, the CIA and their record of terrorist bombings

[RBHam]

Iraq’s new prime minister, the CIA and their record of terrorist bombings
By Peter Symonds
17 June 2004

An article in the New York Times last week about Iraq’s new prime minister, Ayad Allawi, has once again highlighted the hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” and its claims to be bringing democracy to Iraq.

Allawi has a particularly sordid past. The son of a wealthy Shiite family, Allawi was an enthusiastic member of the Baath Party for a decade in Baghdad. He resigned from the party in 1975 while in Britain, became an opponent of the Saddam Hussein regime and began a lengthy collaboration with various intelligence agencies, including MI6 and the CIA. In 1990, as Washington turned on its former ally Hussein and launched the first Gulf War, Allawi established the Iraqi National Accord (INA), composed largely of dissident Baathists, including military and intelligence officers, to take advantage of new opportunities opening up.

All this is openly acknowledged by the INA and Allawi, who recently declared that he was not ashamed of his connections to the CIA and other intelligence services. What the New York Times article revealed, however, was that Allawi and the INA, at the behest of the CIA, carried out various activities inside Iraq in the early 1990s to destabilise the Hussein regime. These included car bombings and attacks of the type that Allawi and the US now denounce as “terrorist”.

Most of the sources for the article are unnamed US intelligence officials. While their statements remain unconfirmed, neither the Bush administration nor Allawi has denied the report’s accuracy. The INA bombings took place between 1992 and 1995 using explosives that were smuggled into the country via the US-imposed “no-fly” zone in northern Iraq, which was a hotbed for CIA intrigue in the 1990s.

US intelligence officials played down the number of civilian casualties. Former CIA operative Robert Baer, who worked with Iraqi exile groups, recalled that one bomb “blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed”. He was not sure if it was the INA’s work, but other intelligence officials told the New York Times that the INA was the only group involved in such activities at the time.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/alla-j17.shtml