The global media is finally taking the pronouncements of former Iraq Prime Minister Iyad Allawi seriously - at least as long as his comments seem to undermine the war on terror.
The Iraqi police "are doing the same as (in) Saddam Hussein's time and worse," complained Allawi, referring to the brutality of the old regime in an interview with the London Observer. "These are the precise reasons why we fought Saddam Hussein and now we are seeing the same things."
Within hours Allawi's comments had been picked up by hundreds of newspapers around the world.
In June 2004, however, when Allawi linked the Iraq war to the 9/11 attacks in a U.S. television interview, he was ignored by the rest of the media.
"We know that [the Iraq war] is an extension to what has happened in New York," he told NBC's Tom Brokaw. "And the war [has] been taken out to Iraq by the same terrorists."
The press was equally silent six months earlier, when Allawi told the London Daily Telegraph that a newly uncovered document from the old intelligence service showed: "Not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks."
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