Word: bayati
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...chaos it was impossible to say whether that haul included the two men whom TIME had seen saved from the mob by U.S. forces. Privately, some U.S. government officials in Washington said they believed, after a preliminary assessment, that secular Baathists loyal to Saddam were responsible. Hamid al-Bayati, SCIRI's spokesman in London, and Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Conference saw the handiwork of Saddam's supporters...
...among some that the defeated regime is not truly finished. Expediency is a factor. With the school year coming to a close, the Americans opted to maintain continuity at universities so students could finish their degrees and enter the job market on schedule. As a result, says Professor al-Bayati, everywhere he looks he sees colleagues who were integral figures in the old order. University president Mohammed al-Rawi, who was also Saddam's personal physician, kept his job. Al-Bayati says al-Rawi did nothing to defend him when he was framed as a spy after quitting the party...
From his prison cell, Hilal Aboud al-Bayati used to dream of U.S. troops overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime. A member of Iraq's Academy of Sciences and father of its national computer center, he was arrested in March 2000 at his University of Baghdad office and, in a secret trial, convicted of espionage. "All we discussed in prison was when the Americans were coming," says al-Bayati, who spent nearly three years behind bars with thousands of other political prisoners...
Today U.S. troops guard the entrance to Baghdad University, but al-Bayati, who gained his freedom in October 2002 in a general amnesty granted by Saddam and has returned to the school, says he is trapped in the past. His tormentors are still in power on the wooded campus. And, to his horror, the U.S. occupiers who are trying to reopen the university are working closely with officials there who colluded with the old regime. "Americans are dealing with the wrong people," says al-Bayati. "They were tools of Saddam Hussein who sat on our chests for 35 years...
...Bayati is incensed: "Coalition forces paid a big price to get rid of Saddam. If these people are left in office, they are capable of killing liberty again." He and other professors have gathered 300 signatures petitioning the U.S. to purge regime hard-liners from the education system. Last Friday U.S. officials met with a non-Baathist academic group assembled by al-Bayati. But al-Bayati still has concerns...