Dictatorship boiling humans alive, new Pentagon anti-ISIS ally?

This video says about itself:

How The CIA Tortured Terror Suspects In Uzbekistan

The West’s Torture Farm (2005) …

Watch Torturing Democracy, Journeyman’s collected playlist on CIA torture: here.

It’s one of the nastiest, most repressive dictatorships in Asia but its relationship with Washington has helped it avoid censure. Just how valuable an ally is Uzbekistan in the War on Terror?

Critics of the government risk being tortured to death, there’s no freedom of speech and all opposition parties are banned. “This is not a government. It’s a monster against its own people,” laments Prof Mirsaidov. In the name of fighting Islamic terror, Uzbekistan has jailed thousands of members of Hiz-but-Tahrir. The problem is, many claim they are innocent and confessions are extracted under torture.

But despite its appalling human rights record, few Western governments seem willing to criticise it. Uzbekistan is now regarded as a key ally in the War on Terror. It allows the US to use its airbases to support operations in Afghanistan and American agents are believed to have ‘rendered’ terrorist suspects to Uzbekistan to be tortured. However, there are growing fears that siding with this repressive regime to fight terrorism is counter productive. As former British Ambassador Craig Murray states: “Our short sighted policy in Asia is creating the terrorism we claim we are fighting.”

The non-democratic governments of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are part of the United States military coalition fighting, officially, ISIS (aka ISIL) terrorism. Even though both the Bahraini and Saudi regimes have some disturbing similarities with, and links to, cruel ISIS.

They are far from being the only dictatorships to which the United States sells arms. Look at Uzbekistan.

Islam Karimov and Hillary Clinton Look at Islam Karimov. This dictator of Uzbekistan boils oppositionists alive. Nevertheless, when she was United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton considered Karimov her “friend”.

From Al Jazeera:

August 28, 2015 12:50AM ET

The United States on Thursday asked Uzbekistan to join the multinational coalition it leads against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), saying Central Asia’s most populous state was free to choose how to the fight against the armed group. …

Uzbekistan, a majority Muslim nation with a population of 31 million, has been a strategic NATO partner in post-Soviet Central Asia, assisting a U.S.-led war on the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. …

Uzbekistan, a gold and cotton producer whose 78-year-old strongman president, Islam Karimov, has been in power since Soviet days, has been criticized by Western governments and human rights bodies for clampdowns on dissent and basic freedoms. …

The criticism was very much more often by human rights bodies than by Western governments (like Tony Blair’s government in Britain).

While noting the need for “closer ties and better sharing information between our security establishments,” Rosenblum lauded Uzbekistan for progress in eliminating child labor in cotton fields, for which Uzbekistan had also been strongly criticized.

He said, however, that more needs to be done in eliminating involuntary adult labor in cotton production.

British daily The Guardian writes about this:

Uzbekistan ban on child labour forces more adults into cotton workforce

Report claims 4 million adults including teachers, businessmen and students pressed into working on cotton harvest

The United States State Department recently claimed there was human rights ‘progress’ in the Bahraini absolute monarchy as well, saying that was an excuse for selling arms to that dictatorship again. Tortured Bahraini political prisoners have not felt any of that ‘progress’.

If the United States government and other NATO governments want to oppose ISIS, then it would be much better to instead remove the only effective forces fighting ISIS, the Turkish and Syrian Kurds, from the lists of so-called ‘terrorists’. Lists which used to include Nelson Mandela, Senator Edward Kennedy, etc.