Hey boys and girls, remember this?

Iyad Allawi is alleged to have shot the prisoners at a Baghdad police station days before power was handed to the interim Iraqi Government last month.

Last night his office denied the accusation, saying it was typical of black propaganda spread by Iraq’s enemies.

and that:

Is there any truth to these tales that Allawi has shot suspects? The stories have been denied by Allawi and dismissed by members of his interim government, the U.S. Embassy and a State Department spokesman. The Iraqi press has refrained from making any mention of the story. On the other hand, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook urged the Red Cross to investigate the allegations. [Emphasis added]

Yet in a Donald Rumsfeld interview with Steve Gill of WWTN, this exchange took place:

STEVE GILL: Change, obviously, is always difficult whether it’s in the military or in a country. Getting back to Iraq, we’ve seen some changes not just in the government structure where Paul Bremer and his team have been replaced now by Prime Minister Allawi and his team. They can do some things it seems to me, Mr. Secretary, that we weren’t able to do. Obviously, they’ve been able to execute a couple of the insurgents — I think six or seven of them. We couldn’t do the same thing. And that tougher approach may bear dividends for them when we really couldn’t do it.

SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, there’s a lot of things that an Iraqi government can do that we can’t do. They have, clearly — foreign troops in your country are always inevitably going to be considered an occupation force and people worry about an occupation force. The Iraqi government is not an occupation force and it can do things and not have its motives questioned and it can be less likely to be criticized, even if they did exactly the same thing. But they are capable of doing things that really will reflect an Iraqi template, Iraqi solution to the problems in Iraq and that’s what they should do — it’s their country. [Emphasis added]

So what, exactly, was Steve talking about? And who was “they?” If the stories aren’t true, why didn’t Rumsfeld say something?!?

(TTBFTL.)