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May 01, 2005
Sending People to Be Boiled to Death to "Combat Terrorism": Meet the 21st Century State, and the 21st Century Propaganda System
It is so hard to come up with "commentary" on these stories. Ummm, yeah, we send people to places where they boil them to death. Ummm, no, no trial or evidence before or after "the rendition."
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. ...
Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in fighting global terrorism. ...
Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation...
...
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.
...
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. ... 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 ...
But here's what really annoys me. Here's the picture of Bush and Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan:
Here's the NYT caption under this photo:
President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House in 2002 to form a partnership to combat terrorism.
See, immediately, it's all explained away. The partnership was formed "to combat terrorism."
Although the article is damning in its evidence, it means but a whiff. If you so easily surrender the context that this is all done to "combat terrorism", who will really object? What's a few people boiled, few fingernails pulled, in this glorious partnership "to combat terrorism"?
This is how our current propaganda system works. The strongest, the most insidious lies are not about the who, what, where or when, but about why.
Posted by zeynep at May 1, 2005 01:33 PM
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Zeynep of UnderTheSameSun is angry again! She quotes an article on yesterday's New York Times by Don Van Natta Jr., who describes the regime in Uzbekistan, formerly a part of the USSR, as a 'litany of horrors'. Uzbekistan is ruled... [Read More]
Tracked on May 2, 2005 12:56 PM