So it was about removing a brutal dictator:

[empath]

So the reason we went into Iraq now was because it was lead by a brutal dictator that tortured and killed his own people...

So, what about this one?

http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/us-and-uz.htm

http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/karimov-bush-ap.jpg

http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/karimov-powell-ap02.jpg

http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/rumsfeld-in-uzbekistan_files/51.jpg

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,963497,00.html


From "US Looks Away as New Ally Tortures Islamists" by Nick Paton Walsh, Guardian (London), 26 May 2003:

Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death.

The US condemned this repression for many years. But since September 11 rewrote America's strategic interests in central Asia, the government of President Islam Karimov has become Washington's new best friend in the region.


---------------------------------------
Among those who have visited with the dictator: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright, General Tommy R. Franks, General Richard B. Myers, General Anthony Zinni, and numerous Senators and Representatives from both parties, including McCain, Lieberman, Daschle, Gramm, and Shelby.

Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov visited the US in March 2002, where he was warmly greeted by President Bush and Rumsfeld.

http://web.amnesty.org/report2003/uzb-summary-eng

From Amnesty International's 2003 report on Uzbekistan:

The bodies of Muzafar Avazov, a 35-year-old father of four, and Khusniddin Alimov, aged 34, were brought from Jaslyk prison in the Northern Karaklapakstan region to their families in Tashkent on 8 August. Muzafar Avazov was reportedly tortured to death; an eyewitness said the body showed signs of burns on the legs, buttocks, lower back and arms. Reportedly, there was a large wound on the back of the head, bruises on the forehead, and the hands had no fingernails. The authorities reportedly restricted viewing of Khusniddin Alimov's body.

[empath]

http://www.1924.org/comment/index.php?id=547_0_13_0_M

Karimov Is Rewarded For Torture And Murder
Jun 21, 2003
Source: 1924.org

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development recently held its annual meeting in Uzbekistan. This was despite reports of mass torture and abuses carried out by Islam Karimov’s security services over the last few years. Such abuses have actually increased, especially since Karimov became a quiet mistress in the West’s war against terror after September 11th. Nonetheless, the Bank managed to clear its conscience, and was helped in that greatly by the countries strong performance in its energy, mining and services sectors.

Since September 11th there has been keen interest by western countries, particularly by America, to engage Uzbekistan. This has been mainly for two reasons, namely the strategic location of Uzbekistan at the heart of Central Asia and the potential future oil and gas resources in the region. The location of the Khanabad Airbase south of Tashkent made it an ideal staging post for the Americans to fight in the north of Afghanistan. No doubt Karimov was delighted to have the world’s superpower join him in doing what he does best; killing and oppressing Muslims.

The Americans clearly felt no hypocrisy in making deals with a man they had spent years condemning for human rights abuses. In fact his tyranny has now gone up several gears, and in return America is now funding him. Last year Washington gave Uzbekistan $500m (£300m) in aid. The police and intelligence services - which the US State department's website acknowledge use "torture as a routine investigation technique" received $79m, to bring their torture equipment up to modern standards. Not only that but Karimov was President Bush's guest in Washington in March last year, where a declaration was signed giving Uzbekistan security guarantees. Since Karimov does not have the support of his people, who he rules over with an iron fist, then these security guarantees must have been for him personally, to protect him from his own people as well as his foreign enemies.

Having knowingly embroiled themselves with a mass murderer, the Americans have used all manner of flowery and fancy declarations, stating Karimov’s improvements in law enforcement, human rights, opposition group’s freedom and expression of religious freedom, to act as a legal fig leaf in their support for his terrorist regime.

However not everyone buys this cover up. There are many in the west who are aware of the situation in Uzbekistan and who know of the American record of hypocrisy supporting brutal regimes when it has some foreign policy interest to gain. Matilda Bogner of Human Rights Watch's office in Tashkent said: "I would deny there has been any real progress. The steps taken are basically window dressing used to get the military funding through the US Congress's ethical laws. Nothing has changed on the ground."

In fact there has been no opposition to sending money to this dictator from a single American lawmaker. We are used to loudmouthed US Senators moralising about oppressive regimes, demanding the US administration take out sanctions against this or that regime. Their voices have been notably quiet, which clearly shows they act in line with the nations interests, regardless of ethical and humanitarian issues. They are happy to keep funding a butcher who is slaughtering thousands of Muslims for believing in Islam, whilst they point to other regimes like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

It is the dire situation of the Muslims in countries such as Uzbekistan that makes it all the more urgent that Islam return to rule in life, state and society. The Khilafah State will liberate the Ummah from the oppression of the western puppets in the Muslim World. It will not accept the division of the Ummah into small and weak nation states, which queue like lambs to the slaughter before the Capitalist powers. It will rather unite the Muslims as one bloc, then work to establish the Muslim Ummah as the number one nation on this earth.

[rajdeep]

There's a piece by Jim Hoagland blasting the $3bil in aid to Pakistan. He doesn't hold back his thoughts:

Fool's Gold in Pakistan (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43469-2003Jun27?language=printer)
Turning the other cheek is not one of President Bush's best-known traits. But he is ready to forgive a lot in the case of Pakistan, where a skillful political alchemist is transforming a record of failure, extremism and betrayal into gold from the U.S. Treasury.

A year after U.S. intelligence confirmed that Pakistan had supplied North Korea's rogue regime with nuclear weapons technology, Bush lavished a much-coveted Camp David welcome on President Pervez Musharraf last week. The general also won a $3 billion aid package.

Bush did this at the urging of his defense and spy chiefs, who face the day-to-day demands of hunting down al Qaeda and other terror groups. They are desperate for whatever immediate cooperation they can squeeze, cajole or buy from Pakistan. But they risk confusing the urgent with the important.

Their needs force Washington to look the other way as Pakistan's Islamic extremists grow more powerful under Musharraf's rule, as cross-border terrorism continues in Kashmir and India (despite Musharraf's promises to end it "permanently") and as it becomes plain that Musharraf intends to remain president indefinitely.

All this is bad enough. But Musharraf's calculated pushing of the American envelope also imperils what promised to be Bush's most innovative and important foreign policy initiative: the building of a new strategic relationship with democratic India.

But no one -- not even Musharraf -- seriously disputes today that the cross-border infiltration from camps run by Pakistan's intelligence services and army continues unabated.

Instead of claiming as he has in the past that there was no infiltration occurring at all, Musharraf told editors and reporters at The Post last week that it was impossible to state with mathematical certainty that movements across the remote, rugged frontier had stopped.

"I can't tell you if there is any cross-border terrorism going on," he said. He responded affirmatively when asked if the position he had conveyed to Bush last week was that he has done everything possible to stop Kashmiri-related terrorism and could do no more. This is a change of emphasis that is certain to upset India.

Musharraf shut off questions about U.S. protests over Pakistan's swapping of nuclear weapons technology for North Korean missiles with a similarly opaque comment: "That chapter is closed." But he carefully avoided disputing that the exchange had occurred, as Pakistani officials have in the past.

Privately, U.S. officials voiced disappointment after the visit that Musharraf gave so little in return for the cash and glory Bush showered on him. But the Pakistani understands the secrets of political alchemy better than they do.

The weaker and more ineffective he seems to become in carrying out his promises, the more the Bush administration will have to give Musharraf to keep him afloat. After all, he proved at Camp David that having some terrorists around to pursue buys a lot of forgiveness.

[empath]

The NY Times catches up to me, a year and a half later.

So what about advancing the cause of freedom in the middle east again?

May 1, 2005
U.S. Recruits a Rough Ally to Be a Jailer
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly, "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in fighting global terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terrorism suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States' criticism.

Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens.

There is other evidence of the United States' reliance on Uzbekistan in the program. On Sept. 21, 2003, two American-registered airplanes - a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737 - landed at the international airport in Tashkent, according to flight logs obtained by The New York Times.

Although the precise purpose of those flights is not known, over a span of about three years, from late 2001 until early this year, the C.I.A. used those two planes to ferry terror suspects in American custody to countries around the world for questioning, according to interviews with former and current intelligence officials and flight logs showing the movements of the planes. On the day the planes landed in Tashkent, the Gulfstream had taken off from Baghdad, while the 737 had departed from the Czech Republic, the logs show.

The logs show at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan by those planes from early 2002 to late 2003, but the records are incomplete.

Details of the C.I.A.'s prisoner transfer program have emerged in recent months from a handful of former detainees who have been released, primarily from prisons in Egypt and Afghanistan, and in some cases have alleged they were beaten and tortured while being held.

The program was created in the mid-1980's as a way for the C.I.A. to transfer crime suspects arrested abroad to their home countries. After Sept. 11, the C.I.A. used it to send prisoners suspected of being senior leaders of Al Qaeda to a half-dozen countries for detention. American intelligence officials estimate that the United States has transferred 100 to 150 suspects to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

A senior C.I.A. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he would not discuss whether the United States had sent prisoners to Uzbekistan or anywhere else. But he said: "The United States does not engage in or condone torture. It does not send people anywhere to be tortured. And it does not knowingly receive information derived from torture."

Ilkhom Zakirov, a spokesman for the Uzbekistan Foreign Ministry in Tashkent, also declined to comment on whether Uzbekistan accepted terror suspects from the United States. He declined to address the accusations from human rights groups. But human rights activists say that because Uzbekistan's record is well known, it raises questions about why the C.I.A. would send suspects there.

"If you talk to anyone there, Uzbeks know that torture is used - it's common even in run-of-the-mill criminal cases," said Allison Gill, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is working inside Uzbekistan. "Anyone in the United States or Europe who does not know the extent of the torture problem in Uzbekistan is being willfully ignorant."

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he learned during his posting to Tashkent that the C.I.A. used Uzbekistan as a place to hold foreign terrorism suspects. During 2003 and early 2004, Mr. Murray said in an interview, "C.I.A. flights flew to Tashkent often, usually twice a week."

In July 2004, Mr. Murray wrote a confidential memo to the British Foreign Office accusing the C.I.A. of violating the United Nations' Prohibition Against Torture. He urged his colleagues to stop using intelligence gleaned in Uzbekistan from terrorism suspects because it had been elicited through torture and other coercive means. Mr. Murray said he knew about the practice through his own investigation and interviews with scores of people who claimed to have been brutally treated inside Uzbekistan's jails.

"We should cease all cooperation with the Uzbek security services - they are beyond the pale," Mr. Murray wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The Times.

Mr. Murray, who has previously spoken publicly about prisoner transfers to Uzbekistan, said his superiors in London were furious with his questions, and he was told that the intelligence gleaned in Uzbekistan could still be used by British officials, even if it was elicited by torture, as long as the mistreatment was not at the hands of British interrogators. "I was astonished," Mr. Murray said in an interview. "It was as if the goal posts had moved. Their perspective had changed since Sept. 11."

A Foreign Office spokesman declined to address Mr. Murray's allegations. Last year, Mr. Murray resigned from the Foreign Office, which had investigated accusations that he mismanaged the embassy in Tashkent. An inquiry into those allegations was closed without any disciplinary action being taken against him.

The relationship between Washington and Tashkent was formalized at a March 2002 Oval Office meeting between President Bush and President Karimov. Muhammad Salih, the leader of Uzbekistan's pro-democracy Erk Democratic Party, who is living in exile in Germany, said the relationship had strengthened Mr. Karimov's hand.

"It's been a great opportunity for Karimov," Mr. Salih said. "But President Bush has to also think about human rights and democracy. If he wants to have a collaboration on antiterror matters, he should not close his eyes on other things that Uzbekistan is doing, like torture."

At a news conference last month, President Bush was asked what Uzbekistan could do in interrogating a suspect that the United States could not.

"We seek assurances that nobody will be tortured when we render a person back to their home country," Mr. Bush said.

The State Department and human rights groups have continued to report on human rights abuses against Uzbeks in prison.

The State Department's latest human rights report on Uzbekistan, issued in February, said: "Torture was common in prisons, pretrial facilities, and local police and security service precincts." In addition, the State Department report noted that in 2003 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture "concluded that torture or similar ill-treatment was systematic."

Amnesty International and other groups have documented specific cases. In the summer of 2002, Amnesty International reported, Fatima Mukhadirova, a 62-year-old Tashkent shopkeeper, was sentenced to six years of hard labor after denouncing the government for the death of her son, Muzafar Avozov, in a Tashkent prison.

An independent examination of photographs of the body, conducted by the University of Glasgow, showed that Mr. Avozov died after being immersed in boiling water, human rights groups reported. The examination said his head had been beaten and his fingernails removed.

Human rights activists pressed for Ms. Mukhadirova's release. She was freed shortly before a planned visit by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in February 2004.

Human rights activists say that the United States has a difficult balancing act to maintain in its dealings with Uzbekistan.

"The relationship between the U.S. and Uzbekistan is problematic," Ms. Gill of Human Rights Watch said. "It can be useful that the U.S. is powerful enough to push for certain concessions. That being said, the U.S. should not be saying that Karimov is a partner, is an ally, is a friend. The U.S. should send the message that Uzbekistan won't be considered to be a good ally of the United States unless it respects human rights at home."

The delicate diplomatic balance played out in the early spring of 2004, after a series of suicide bombings in Tashkent killed 47 people, many of them Uzbek police officers. The government cracked down against people on religious grounds, setting off international condemnation.

Three months later, despite the urgings of the Uzbek foreign minister, Sodik Safoyev, the State Department said it would cut $18 million in military and economic aid to Uzbekistan because of its failure to improve its human rights record.

But the next month, on Aug. 12, 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs, visited Tashkent. He met with President Karimov and other officials, and he announced that the Pentagon would provide an additional $21 million to help Uzbekistan in its campaign to remove its stockpile of biological weapons.

General Myers said the United States had "benefited greatly from our partnership and strategic relationship with Uzbekistan."

While he noted that there were genuine concerns about Uzbekistan's human rights record, General Myers said: "In my view, we shouldn't let any single issue drive a relationship with any single country. It doesn't seem to be good policy to me."

Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Frankfurt for this article, and Stephen Grey from London.

[NYGblue]

nooooo dude... by making them our ally they will WANT to be democratic... see they will see our country and how great it is and then magically want to share power with others!

[BizarroCub]

Let's also not forget that now the Sudan is a good ally in the war on terror...

Mind you over 300,000 people have been brutally murdered there in the past two years, but hey...they're helping T.W.A.T.

[empath]

*bump*

[method]

i hate messy political work - this is exactly the type of shotty work that got us in this mess. way to go neocons - glad you see you've learned exactly jack shit in the past 30 years.

[AmandaHuie]

Torturing Islamists is so hot right now.

[method]

torturing muslims? that's hot. /hilton