Who didn't see this coming?
Today's New York Times reports the unsurprising and probably consequence-less news that Uzbekistani government ministries receiving American counterterrorism support are implicated in last month's massacre in Andijon.
The International Crisis Group provides its usual indispensable coverage of the massacre. Check out its full report in pdf or Word format.
The news is unsurprising because even back in the Clinton years, our counterterrorism support for Uzbekistan conflicted with Madeleine Albright's public recognition that the Karimov government was using terrorism as a justification for brutal abuses of political challengers. This is nothing new, and if the Clinton administration did more Hamlet-like hand-wringing than Bush's theocrats about supporting Karimov with security assistance, both sets have had ample evidence of the culpability of the regime in human rights abuses that shade toward the truly ghoulish.
And it won't have many consequences for the obvious reasons.
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