The Workday Liberal

The more I think about it, the more outraged I am regarding the contention of former U.K. ambassador Craig Murray of what the U.S. ambassador said when approached about the torture of Uzbek prisoners:

The American ambassador said to me "well most of them are Muslims" as though that explained everything. I said that I didn't think that seemed like particularly good reason why they should be locked up. He said "But they're extreme Muslims".

The conclusion one must draw from this is that if Mr. Murray is accurately portraying the interplay between him and the U.S. ambassador that this ambassador is absolutely a bigot of the 1st order. By his line of thinking it is ok to inflict the worst forms of torture known to human kind (boiling alive is particularly gruesome) simply because the victims practice Islam. There is no concern that the victims are not actually involved with terrorism. They are Muslims, or 'extreme Muslims' and that's thats all the goody two shoes UK ambassador needs to know to justify it. Absolutely deplorable!

Even if the point of the American ambassador is that these torture victims are somehow proven to be associated with terrorists, that in no way justifies the torture. The fact that an American ambassador could justify that behavior in any context imaginable simply boggles the mind. These are evil men. Both the enabler and the executioner of the torture. Evil. I mean I'm certain the Uzbeks have reams of paper detailing how the victims of their torture confessed to terrorist connections. In the speech by Murray he details the following event.

An old man came in and he was charged, he had signed a statement saying that two of the accused who were nephews of his were associates of Osama Bin Laden, had been to Afghanistan, and met Bin Laden on a regular basis. He was standing there, and he was an old gentleman, frail and bowed, with a very oriental appearance, a long white beard, and a skull cap. And he was standing there while his sentence was given out, mumbling his answers and suddenly he pulled himself erect looked at the judge in the eye and he said "it's not true- they tortured my children in front of me until I signed this. We are poor farmers, what do we know of Osama Bin Laden? What have I to do with Bin Laden?" He was quickly hustled out by the military. It felt to me that what he was saying was the truth.

Well now the Uzbeks have proof that this family is associated with Osama, and I imagine the American ambassador thought this was perfectly fine activity by our Uzbek allies in the war on terror. We now find ourselves justifying an ally in the war on terror that tortures children. When will the good people of America wake up?

It is this type of example and the myriad other actions taken by our leaders that alienate those who we should be trying to win over in the war on terror. And when our leaders take overtly bigoted positions we would do well to not let it fly under the radar, but to sit up and take notice. It is vitally important to our success in the struggle we find ourselves in. A struggle both against militant Moslem extremists, and now against ourselves as our leaders effectively disregard the principles that we are supposed to stand for.