Thursday, May 26, 2005

TomPaine.com - UzBushistan

TomPaine.com - UzBushistan: David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).

"The Bush administration's ho-hum response to this incident is no surprise. Bush's pro-democracy doctrine is only half a doctrine; he doesn't apply it whole-heartedly to nations that his administration needs. For years before the massacre, Karimov ran a nasty regime. Amnesty International's 2004 report noted that Uzbekistan held at least 6,000 political prisoners in cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions: 'Human rights defenders and hundreds of people suspected of political or religious dissent were harassed, beaten and detained without trial, or sentenced to prison terms after unfair trails and frequently tortured or ill-treated.' In previous years, human rights watchers reported that so-called 'independent' Muslims who attended mosques not under the control of the government were harassed and their religious leaders were imprisoned and disappeared. Some reports noted that dissidents had been boiled alive. None of this prevented Bush from making friends with Karimov in order to prosecute the war on terror."



  • Check out Warren Beatty's remarks about Arnold Schwarzenegger
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