Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki 'copies Saddam Hussein' (claims Allawi)

[sabra]

Source: The Daily Telegraph

Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is orchestrating a campaign of persecution against political rivals "even worse" than Saddam Hussein's reign of terror, his predecessor has claimed.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Ayad Allawi claimed agents of Mr Maliki's Dawa Party were tightening their control of Iraq to emulate the creeping coup tactics used by the deposed Ba'ath Party to take over in the 1960s.

He claimed that Mr Maliki commands his own intelligence and security agencies.

"This is what we call a system of intimidation as it used to happen in Saddam's times," said Mr Allawi, who was interim prime minister between 2004 and 2005. "It is the same system, even worse.

"This is how the Ba'ath Party took over in the coup of 1968. There was a kind of coalition but gradually they built their own security and their own intelligence and their own hit teams."

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/28/wiraq128.xml

[Kagemusha]

1. Gasp! Maliki has his own intel unit - one not controlled by the CIA!

This offends Allawi's sensibilities.

[kirby]

2. I think Maliki is pure evil...

This is very odd, but when Maliki spoke to a joint session of Congress, I remember seeing a fly buzzing around him in Congress. A vision of pestilence flashed into my agnostic brain. It was the weirdest sort of deja-vu.

[libodem]

3. When are the next elections?

Do they get the Dibold machines we reject?

[acmavm]

4. Ayad is a nasty bit of goods himself.

You ain't gonna get no saint to run that place. But we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.