I Cogitate

Hey, back again here with further evidence of the (im)moral relativism that permeates your choice of an oh-so-righteous and upstanding President Bush-led administration. Please do clue me in on how these gray-studded actions dovetail with YOUR clearly black-and-white superior value system.

I give you example #1 courtesy of Mark Goldberg's April 29, 2005 article in the online edition of The American Prospect:

"On April 14, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick became the highest ranking U.S. envoy to set foot on Sudanese soil since Secretary of State Colin Powell’s September 2004 declaration that the government of Sudan was complicit in an ongoing genocide in the Darfur region. The presence of such a senior U.S. envoy in the country held great promise for progress on Darfur. With enough pressure, the regime in Khartoum may yet decide to reign in its local Janjaweed (the Arab militia in Sudan) allies and stop its fleet of Antonov fighter jets and helicopter gunships from further targeting civilian enclaves in Darfur.

The significance of Zoellick’s trip was not lost on Sudan’s main power broker, first Vice President Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha...

...When asked by a BBC reporter how many people the United States thinks have died due to fighting in Darfur, Zoellick gave an astonishingly low estimate of 60,000 to 160,000 people. That number defies even the most conservative claims of the number killed; the lower reaches fall far short of any previous estimate and the upper range is less than half the number reached by an April 22 mortality study compiled by the Coalition for International Justice, which calculated that nearly 400,000 people had died since the conflict began two years ago...

KHARTOUM, Sudan ­ The Bush administration has forged a close intelligence partnership with the Islamic regime that once welcomed Osama bin Laden here, even though Sudan continues to come under harsh U.S. and international criticism for human rights violations.

The Sudanese government, an unlikely ally in the U.S. fight against terror, remains on the most recent U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. At the same time, however, it has been providing access to terrorism suspects and sharing intelligence data with the United States.

Last week, the CIA sent an executive jet here to ferry the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency to Washington for secret meetings sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration, U.S. government officials confirmed.

A decade ago Bin Laden and his fledgling Al Qaeda network were based in Khartoum. After they left for Afghanistan, the regime of Sudanese strongman Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir retained ties with other groups the U.S. accuses of terrorism.

As recently as September, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell accused Sudan of committing genocide in putting down an armed rebellion in the western province of Darfur. And the administration warned that the African country's conduct posed "an extraordinary threat to the national security" of the United States...

...Sudan's government has been accused of large-scale human rights violations, and the administration has been one of its leading global critics. In Congress, allies of human rights advocates share strong anti-Sudanese sentiment with supporters of conservative Christian groups that have been sympathetic to Christian and animist rebels in southern Sudan, where a peace deal has taken hold.

Concern that the White House might soften its policy toward Sudan on the Darfur issue to encourage intelligence assistance was raised in an October report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. It said Gosh and other Sudanese officials had played "key roles in directing … attacks against civilians" and noted that the administration was "concerned that going after these individuals could disrupt cooperation on counter-terrorism."

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly, "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in fighting global terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terrorism suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States' criticism...

...The State Department and human rights groups have continued to report on human rights abuses against Uzbeks in prison.

The State Department's latest human rights report on Uzbekistan, issued in February, said: "Torture was common in prisons, pretrial facilities, and local police and security service precincts." In addition, the State Department report noted that in 2003 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture "concluded that torture or similar ill-treatment was systematic."

Quoted by Media Matters as spouting this on his April 27 show:

LIMBAUGH: "I would submit to you that people on the left are religious, too. Their God is just different. The left has a different God. There's a religious left in this country.

"And, the religious left in this country hates and despises the God of Christianity and Catholicism and whatever else. They despise it because they fear it, because it's a threat, because that God has moral absolutes. That God has right and wrong, that God doesn't deal in nuance, that God doesn't deal in gray area, that God says, 'This is right and that is wrong.'"

So, is your stranglehold on values as tight as you thought? How about them policies from straightshootin'-you'll-always-know-where-I-stand President Bush? There sure appears to be a goodly (definitely not godly) amount of weaving, ducking, shuffling and backpedaling taking place.

Watch out for the company you're keeping. If you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

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