I'm confused (again)

After the US invaded Iraq and found that, "gosh, heck!" there were no WMDs to be found they shifted paradigm and became the saintly liberators of an oppressed people. So it is with great confusion I find myself reading now that, courtesy of documents provided by the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, the US is injecting millions of dollars into a country that tortures and oppresses its people. And the US's cash injections are just the tip of the iceberg - they are also more than happy to have the Uzbek leader, Ruslan Sharipov, over for their little political tea-parties; they quash UN human rights reports on Uzbek torture and they happily accept intelligence received from victims of the same.

What I'm detecting here is that it's okay to torture as long as it's in the West's interests.

And make no mistake folks these guys - the Uzbek government - are bad. Really bad:

"There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water. Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death.

His crime, like that of many of the country's prisoners, was practicing his religion."

So, over at America blog they've published the documents in their entirety. It is lengthy reading, and it includes the frustrated emails of Craig Murray as he tries to explain to his government why it's immoral to be dealing with such a dictatorship, so skim read it as you will.

I guess what comes out of all this is that, as He Who Shall Not Be Named often states, "there is an evil that lurks," blah, blah, blah. In fact... wait a minute... I just saw some footage of the White House on the news and, unless my eyes mistake me, I think I've spotted that lurking evil. $2,000 dollar suit, yep; strange, disturbing facial ticks, yep; stammering, incoherent address to the media, yep...