Show Trials and Phony Confessions Target Syria

AP reports on a televised confession of someone who said he was a Syrian agent in Iraq in charge of terrorist operations. The confession was broadcast on US-backed al-Iraqiyah television, and was produced presumably by the former Baath domestic intelligence officers appointed by Iyad Allawi.

These confessions are phony as a three-dollar bill (or a three-Euro coin). AP reports with a straight face that al-Essa "claimed he infiltrated Iraq in 2001, about two years before the U.S. invasion, because Syrian intelligence was convinced that American military action loomed." That allegation doesn't pass the smell test with me. If this guy was sent in 2001, it was to make trouble for Saddam, not with reference to America. The Syrian Baath mostly did not get on well with the Iraqi Baath. Another confessed terrorist said he was sent to Pakistan for training and then Syria. Oh, now we have a Baath-Islamist axis again. Sure. Shiite secular Arab nationalists are just dying to get up a collaboration with non-Arab Pakistani hyper-Sunnis who paint "Kill the Shiites" on their mini-buses in Lahore.

It is embarrassing that Allawi thought he could peddle this horse manure to the Iraqi and American publics.