Uzbekistan Ruler Croaks
It Takes a Torturer to Be a “Partner in the U.S. Terror War”
September 5, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
CNN's September 3 headline reads: “U.S. loses partner in terror war with death of Uzbekistan’s leader.” Give the headline writer some credit: It IS a U.S. terror war.
Of course, that isn’t the message of the article. CNN’s story began: “The death of Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov could pose serious challenges for the U.S. in areas such as counterterrorism and could become another flash point in the contentious U.S.-Russia relationship.
“Since 9/11, Uzbekistan has been at times critical to US foreign policy objectives in Central and South Asia, including in Afghanistan and in efforts to curb Russian influence in the region.”
American Lives
Are Not More
Important Than
Other People's Lives.
Bob Avakian,
BAsics 5:7
What does it mean to be a partner in the U.S. terror war? Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray was revolted by ghastly crimes he saw. Testifying about the horrors of Karimov’s regime at the Bush Crimes Commission in NYC in 2006, he said:
When I came across cases of people being boiled alive, cases of daughters being raped in front of their fathers, cases of torture of children, and the fact that we were receiving intelligence from those torture sessions, it seemed to me axiomatic that anyone brought up in the United States or the United Kingdom would believe their overriding and only duty was to stop it. And, perhaps naively, when I started trying to stop it internally, I actually believed that this must be the work of renegade people at lower levels and that once senior politicians in the UK and US knew what was happening, they would stop it. I was quickly disillusioned. I discovered this part of a wider international policy of the use of torture in the pursuit of the war on terror.
And, he said, “This may sound exaggerated. But it isn’t. At that moment I understood how some civil servant ended up writing out the orders for cattle trucks to go to Auschwitz, and felt they were only ‘doing their job.’ And ladies and gentlemen, that is what we face now: the flight toward fascism.”
Such is the rarely exposed nature of regimes around the world the U.S. calls partners in a war OF TERROR—against humanity. And no amount of crimes by the “other side” in the clash between the West and fundamentalist Islamic Jihad can justify anyone going along with this!
Craig Murray set an important standard in the face of the rulers of the U.S. justifying torture as “saving American lives.” He said, “I would personally rather die than have anyone tortured to save my life.”
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