What Comes Around

The following will be submitted to the Seattle Times letters editor. Nothing really so different from what this blogger has written many times in the past. But we'll see if it's "fit to print".

The reactions to the murder of Nick Berg by some letter-writers in the May 13 Times -- "demonic representatives", "nest of rats", "evil militant animals", "rabid dogs", "savages", "exterminate", "non-humans" -- demonstrate their keen knowledge of Nazi history.

But they might do to bone up on some U.S. history as well. To wit, the perpetrators of that murder -- drawn from precisely the same broader group, using precisely the same methods, at the behest of many of the same figures (notably Messrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Negroponte, and Libby) that comprise the current Bush Administration -- were originally recruited, trained, and funded by the CIA to participate in its "great game" in Central Asia.

Back then, though, they were not considered sub-human. Indeed, no less than Ronald Reagan himself proclaimed them "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of America."

But of course, we need not look twenty years into the past to discover moral equivalents. The current President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has within his bag of tricks the boiling of prisoners alive. Karimov recently played host to a visit by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, much as Saddam Hussein played host to Rumsfeld lo those many years ago. Karimov is not considered sub-human, but rather an "ally" in the so-called "War on Terror".

Isn't that funny?

Posted by Eddie Tews at May 13, 2004 07:45 PM