excerpts from another article by the same journalist:
Hard man for a tough country; Paul McGeough; July 17, 2004; Sydney Morning Herald

Iraq's interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, tells people he's a "tough guy". Witnesses allege his actions support his words. His enemies say he was an assassin for Saddam Hussein. Now Iyad Allawi is accused of personally executing prisoners. .. His Justice Minister is bringing back the death penalty; his Defence Minister warns he'll chop off insurgents' hands and heads.

…Surprisingly, few Iraqis professed to be shocked by the allegations. But why would Allawi do it? The answer is not so difficult in Iraq. If he could kill for Saddam when the former president was on the verge of power, wouldn't it come more easily if it would help Allawi cement his own grip on the levers?
…It took courage for the witnesses to speak. They were reluctant to speak until they had guarantees of anonymity; one of them even insisted that the Herald not reveal the chance element that intervened as he was located deep in suburban Baghdad. These men are afraid for their lives.

…When the highest-ranking US offficials in Iraq were appraised of the witness accounts 10 days ago, there was no outright denial. Allawi got to the top from the shadows of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, the first and flailing Washington effort to put an Iraqi face on its occupation… he is said to have spent much time in Jordan and Britain - and in the US, where he spent a reported $US300,000($415,000) on New York and Washington lobbyists to enhance his image higher up the geopolitical food chain.

When the United Nations sent Lakhdar Brahimi to Baghdad in the northern spring to craft a new interim government, he called for neutral "technocrats and professionals" to guide Iraq to its planned January elections. But Allawi is a master of backroom political manoeuvring. He had to climb over the ferocious ambition of his arch rival, Ahmad Chalabi, and the reservations of Brahimi, who vented his frustrations at Allawi's emergence as the winner with his sharp denunciation of the departing US administrator, Paul Bremer, as the "dictator of Baghdad".

..The new Prime Minister was in league with Saddam in the late '60s and there is an assumption that he broke with the tyrant when he went to London in 1971. But various reports suggest that he remained on the Baghdad payroll at least until 1975. And the idea that the break was about principle is tempered by suggestions of a row over a sizeable wad of cash. A senior Jordanian official who met the new Prime Minister "dozens of times" before the US invasion was always worried about an Allawi ascendancy. He explained to the Herald this week: "He made it clear that he was going back to Iraq with vengeance; it was never going to be about a beauty of democracy, so much as a settling of scores.

"Think about it: it is the resistance that will be his downfall, so he thinks if he kills them, he will prevail." Early this year, a vivid article by one of the Prime Minister's former medical school classmates, Dr Haifa al-Azawi, published in an Arabic newspaper in London, was hardly noticed, despite what it revealed of the Prime Minister's character and qualifications. Describing Allawi as a "big, husky man", she wrote: "[He] carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorising the medical students." And of his medical degree, she wrote: "[It] was conferred upon him by the Baath party."

…..An unnamed Middle Eastern diplomat claim[ed] that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that ran to ground and killed Baath party dissenters throughout Europe. In 1978, the brutal world in which Allawi moved came home to him, literally, when he was attacked in his London bed in the middle of the night by a man brandishing an axe. This was the third attempt on his life and he spent a year in hospital, recovering from horrific injuries presumed to have been inflicted at the behest of Saddam. It was after this attack that Allawi began his long and close associations first with the British intelligence agency MI6 and then with the CIA, which still helps fund his Iraqi National Accord (INA) organisation.
In the early 1990s, as Washington and London began to take Iraqi opposition groups more seriously after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, Allawi set up the INA. One of his early organisational associates was Salih Omar Ali al-Tikriti, who reportedly had supervised public hangings in Baghdad for Saddam. Juan Cole, a Middle East historian at the University of Michigan, wrote of a stinging assessment of the Prime Minister's leanings: "He is infatuated with reviving the Baath secret police, bringing back Saddam's domestic spies. Unlike the regular [Iraqi] army, which had dirty and clean elements, all of the secret police are dirty. If they are restored, civil liberties are a dead letter."

It sounds like Saddam-Lite in the making; and in it all there's an odour of the Arab authoritarianism that the Bush men say they came to eradicate.

The much more detailed article is at:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/16/1089694565543.html