The FBI: An American Cheka

Nearly twenty years ago, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh – still basking in his agency’s residual glory from the Mt. Carmel Massacre of April 1993 – visited Moscow to sign a joint cooperation accord with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). After touring the Lubyanka Square headquarters of the Russian secret police, Freeh observed that “Our nations have more in common than ever before.”

At the time I thought it was shocking that Freeh would traduce his country, and his agency, by offering that comparison to the renamed KGB. Roughly two decades later I’ve come to understand that if the comparison is offensive, the Russians have the stronger claim to be the insulted party. 

Like their Russian and Soviet siblings, the FBI’s primary role is that of fabricating crimes in the service of the state. Since 1991 – more particularly, since 2001 – the FBI has engaged in this behavior far more extensively than the Russians, both in terms of the volume of fabrications and the geographical reach of its operations. And evidence is accumulating that the Bureau has added assassination to its proto-totalitarian toolkit. 

In his study The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzenitsyn records that “the creation of fabricated cases began back in the early years of the Organs” – that is, immediately after the Soviet secret police agency was created in 1917. The routine fabrication of offenses was done by the Chekists “so that their constant salutary activity might be perceived as essential. Otherwise, what with a decline in the number of enemies, the Organs might, in a bad hour, have been forced to wither away.”

From its inception, the Soviet secret police agency was engaged in what we now call “Homeland Security Theater.” The same could be said of the FBI, which actually had a nine-year head start on its Soviet counterpart. J. Edgar Hoover’s two chief priorities were the collection of what the Soviets would call kompromat on significant public figures – politicians, policy-makers, celebrities – and the management of his secret police agency’s public image. With the advent of COINTELPRO in the 1950s, the FBI became fully engaged in a campaign of surveillance, harassment, disruption, and assassination (if only by proxy) targeting political dissidents. Since that time, the FBI has been a fully realized political police organization, in every evil sense of that expression.

Like their Chekist forebears, FBI Special Agents don’t solve crimes; instead, they extract confessions through intimidation or blackmail. Where confessions aren’t forthcoming, FBI interrogators will routinely deploy the usefully ambiguous and self-ratifying charge of making a “materially false statement to a federal agent” to punish those who refuse to submit. 

Mind you, FBI agents – like all other law enforcement personnel in the United States – are trained and encouraged to lie as an “investigative” technique. They face no criminal, civil, or administrative punishment for lying in the course of an interrogation. Once again, they share this trait with their Soviet and Russian kindred.

“We lambs are forbidden to lie, but the interrogator could tell all the lies he felt like,” observed Solzhenitsyn. “Those articles of the law did not apply to him…. He could confront us with as many documents as he chose, bearing the forged signatures of our kinfolk and friends – and it would be just a skillful interrogation technique” rather than a prosecutable deception. 

A victim who is manipulated, intimidated, and barraged with unfamiliar and often contradictory details and accusations will inevitably say something that could be considered incriminating – or that he might later contradict in some trivial way. Those who are drawn into FBI interrogation sessions suffer from an additional disadvantage: The Bureau’s inquisitors, as a matter of inflexible policy, refuse to permit an objective record of their investigative interviews. 

 

An FBI "302" report.

“FBI agents always interview in pairs,” writes the indispensable constitutional scholar Harvey Silverglate. “One agent asks the questions, while the other writes up what is called a `form 302 report’ based on his notes. The 302 report, which the interviewee does not normally see, becomes the official record of the exchange; any interview who contests its accuracy risks prosecution for lying to a federal official, a felony. And here is the key problem that throws the accuracy of all such statements and reports into doubt: FBI agents almost never electronically record their interrogations; to do so would be against written policy.”

A 2006 internal FBI memo obtained by the New York Times insisted that laying bare the Bureau’s interrogation sessions to the unenlightened eyes and untutored ears of the lay public would be an offense akin to tearing the veil away from the Holy of Holies. The common public might mistakenly believe that “perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques” may involve “unfair deceit,” and question “the quality of evidence” produced thereby. 

In the Stalin-era Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn recalled, victims of secret police interrogation would be handed a “206” form to sign attesting to the accuracy of the official report, and the propriety of the methods used to extract information during the session. Defense Attorney Sam Fields points out that subjects of FBI interrogations – whether they are potential witnesses or potential defendants -- will sometimes be given a copy of the resulting 302 document prior to trial.

“If your interview lasted more than thirty seconds, it is guaranteed you will find numerous discrepancies,” Fields advises us. “Some of them will be insignificant; some of them could be material…. Whether or not the `302’ discrepancies are a result of stupidity or cupidity makes no difference. Testify in opposition to the `302’ and you are in the crosshairs of the Feds. If they believe your testimony cost them the case, the next thing you [are] likely to hear from the FBI will be: `Please place your hands behind your back.’” 

Furthermore, as trial attorney Norm Pattis warns us, 302s can be used to incriminate and convict defendants, but never to exonerate them. In 2007, Pattis notes, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut “moved in limine to preclude the defense from using a 302 to impeach witnesses.” What that meant, in substance, was that the US Attorney in that case admitted “that FBI 302s aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on” – unless, of course, they can be used in a retaliatory prosecution of a witness or defendant who has somehow thwarted a U.S. Attorney’s ambition, or frustrated an FBI agent. 

Another Chekist-approved method favored by the contemporary FBI is the entrapment of innocent people, either as a pure exercise in Homeland Security Theater or in order to compel them to act as informants or provocateurs. Over the past decade, this has become the FBI’s métier. The case of Portland, Oregon resident Mohamed Osman Mohamud is a museum-quality exhibit of the first approach. The Bureau’s relentless harassment of Muslims at a mosque briefly attended by Mohamud offers numerous examples of the latter tactic in action.

Mohamud’s case has been previously examined in detail. Here’s a brief capsule summary:

At age 18, as the Somali-born Portland resident got caught in an undertow of jihadist radicalism, his father made the fatal error of contacting the FBI to express concerns. The Bureau very thoughtfully braced the young man with two of its “terrorism facilitators,” who took charge of the young man’s indoctrination. Then they prevented him from flying to Alaska to take a commercial fishing job. 

After eliminating any possibility that this alienated young man could have found a way to make an honest living, the FBI’s Homeland Security Theater troupe played out the familiar script: They played to the entirely justifiable outrage felt by this young man over the US government’s treatment of Muslims in Somalia, then carefully manipulated him into pushing a button on what he thought was a bomb at Portland’s 2010 Christmas tree lighting ceremony. 

Yonas Fikre (l.) with his attorney in Sweden.

 While one element of the Portland, Oregon FBI office was targeting Mohamud, another was focusing its malign attention on a young Eritrean-born man named Yonas Fikre, who, like Mohamud, had attended Portland’s As-Saber mosque. In April 2010, Fikre traveled to Sudan, where he planned to start a cell phone business. His first stop was at the US Consulate in Khartoum, where a State Department representative advised him to file paperwork for a Sudanese business license.

Shortly thereafter, Fikre received a phone call from a man named David Noordeloos, who represented himself as an official at the embassy. He told Fikre that he was one of several U.S. citizens in Sudan who had been invited to a luncheon at the US Embassy the following day in order to receive a briefing about safety concerns.

When Fikre showed up at the Embassy the following morning, he was taken into a small room and held for interrogation by Noordeloos and another man named Jason Dundas, who identified themselves as FBI Special Agents. Fikre immediately demanded that he have access to his attorney before being questioned. The FBI agents told him that he had been placed on the “no-fly list” and thus couldn’t return to the United States in order to confer with his attorney.

Leaving aside the fact that there is a common technology called a “telephone” that would make the distances involved irrelevant, it’s worth underscoring the fact that the FBI uses the “no-fly list” as a kind of virtual Berlin Wall: The Bureau used it to trap Mohamud in the continental U.S., so he could be indoctrinated by its terrorism facilitators, and they used it to trap Fikre overseas so he couldn’t have access to his attorney.

During that April 22, 2010 conversation (appropriately enough, it occurred on Lenin’s birthday), Noordeloos explained that the FBI wanted to conscript Fikre as an informant within the As-Saber mosque. He promised that he would be well-compensated to act as a stukach, that he would enjoy “the good life” if he were to become a snitch. He also made it plain that refusal to cooperate would have awful consequences. 

“Don’t you love your wife?” Noordeloos asked ominously at one point in the interrogation. (“One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved,” observed Solzhenitsyn of NKVD interrogation techniques.) 

Since Fikre couldn’t go back to the U.S., he was released from the US Embassy. A few days later, he received an e-mail from Noordeloos that said, among other things, that “The time to help yourself is now.”

Over the next two months, Fikre noticed that he was being followed by plainclothes police. In June 2010 he left Sudan, eventually arriving in the United Arab Emirates. A year later, after moving to the city of Al Ain in Abu Dhabi, Fikre was kidnapped from his home by agents of the UAE secret police, who blindfolded him and took him to a dungeon, where he was held captive and tortured for 106 days.

The interrogators who tormented Fikre had been given detailed information about him by the FBI, and repeatedly demanded that he cooperate with the Bureau. When he resisted answering questions, or inquired as to whether his jailers were working as proxies for the FBI, he was “repeatedly beaten severely on his head, back, legs, and feet with plastic pipes, required to assume stress positions for hours, and threatened with death by strangulation by use of a flexible pipe,” Fikre recalls in a recently filed lawsuit. “One particularly painful torture method his interrogators used was to force plaintiff to lie on his stomach with his sandals off, whereupon he was beaten severely on the soles of his feet; thereafter, he was required to stand on his feet, which … caused him great pain.”

One repeated line of inquiry dealt with Mohamed Osman Mohamud – the 18-year-old  from Portland who had been lured into playing a leading role in a Homeland Security Theater production. It is quite possible that the FBI was trying to torture Fikre into providing “evidence” against their patsy, in the event that they confronted that rarest of things, a conscientious federal jury. 

In July 2011, Fikre’s family and friends, working through an attorney, reported that he had gone missing and was likely in the custody of the UAE secret police. A consulate employee made a perfunctory visit to his cell, and concluded that the victim – who had dropped thirty pounds, and had been told that he would be tortured to death if he revealed the abuse he had received – was in “good shape.” The consulate representative was assured that Fikre would be released “tomorrow.” He was held for another eight weeks. When he went to the airport, Fikre was told that he was forbidden to return to the U.S. because his name was still on the no-fly list. An involuntary exile, Fikre was eventually offered political asylum by a relatively free country, Sweden.

Fikre was one of at least five men who attend the As-Saber mosque whose names have been inscribed in what we could call the “Berlin Wall Registry” – or what the Regime calls the “no-fly list.” None of them has been charged with terrorism or related crimes. None has been told why he is on the list. 

 

Back in the USSA: Tarhuni.

Among the other victims was Libyan-born US citizen Jamal Tarhuni, who was kidnapped by the Feds in Tunis while trying to return from a humanitarian trip to his war-afflicted homeland in January 2012. Tarhuni had provided translation and consulting services on behalf of a Christian charitable organization called Teams International. After being told that his name was on the Berlin Wall Registry, he was drawn into a protracted interrogation by a set of FBI agents under the lead of Special Agent Brian Zinn.

In Tarhuni’s case, the victim was told that he would be released if he took a polygraph test. A female FBI agent requested that Tarhuni sign an electronic release form on her computer. As he examined the document, Tarhuni realized that it was a waiver of several constitutionally protected rights. He quite sensibly refused to sign the form. As punishment, he was effectively imprisoned for three weeks in Tunis before his Portland-based attorney, Thomas Nelson, was able to arrange for him to fly home via Paris and Amsterdam. 

Tarhuni was obviously more fortunate than Fikre, but they both should regard themselves as blessed in light of the FBI’s recent execution-style murder of Orlando resident Ibragim Todashev, a Chechen-born acquaintance of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. 

Yes, this was an extra-judicial murder. Todashev was unarmed, surrounded by FBI agents, Massachusetts State Troopers, and officers from the Orlando Police Department. The original story – ventilated by an anonymous source to a credulous Regime-aligned news outlet -- was that Todashev, who was supposedly prepared to confess involvement in an unsolved triple murder, suddenly snapped and threatened the bold and valiant G-Men with a knife. That story has since been “rectified”; the new version is that the unarmed and outnumbered young man threatened the Chekists with a metal rod – or perhaps he threw a table at one of the interrogators -- and simply had to be gunned down.

None of this would explain why there was a bullet entry wound in the back of Todashev’s head, a location suspiciously close to the spot preferred by the NKVD executioners who fed condemned political prisoners a “Lubyanka breakfast” – that is, a cigarette and a bullet to the back of the head. 

That variety of lethal room service was a standard feature of the basement cells of the facility toured by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh on July 4, 1994, before he correctly observed that his agency and the one that maintained that dungeon had “more in common than ever before.” Truer words have rarely, if ever, departed the tax-devouring skull cave of a federal bureaucrat.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Protected Predator Class

Deputy Creeper, I presume? Scott Womack in court.

In Utah, as elsewhere in the Soyuz, “battering” a police officer is considered an especially grievous crime. Until earlier this year, this offense was treated as a Class A misdemeanor. Under SB 131, a measure enacted earlier this year by the state legislature, it is now a class C felony.

Any incidental contact between a Mundane and the sanctified personage of a police officer – including the act of breathing on an officer – can be prosecuted as “battery.” This would apply to cases in which a woman is desperately trying to prevent an officer from violating her sexually: A victim who puts up resistance in such circumstances can expect to be violently subdued, arrested, and charged with “assaulting an officer.” 

In Utah, a victim of a sexual assault by a police officer could easily find herself convicted of a felony unless she submits with docility to whatever the armed predator is willing to inflict on her. On the other hand, if the officer is exposed as a sex offender, it’s quite likely that he would face misdemeanor charges. This is illustrated by the case of former Box Elder County Sheriff’s Deputy Scott Womack, who is facing multiple lawsuits and criminal charges involving illegal strip-searches of young women conducted during traffic stops over a period of about two years. 

In February, Womack pleaded no contest to three counts of attempted custodial misconduct – which is a misdemeanor offense. In exchange for Womack’s plea, county prosecutors dropped nine additional charges – all of them misdemeanors, as well. 

Under the plea bargain agreement, Womack’s name would not be permanently inscribed in the sex offender registry – despite the fact that his acts are, by definition, those of a violent sex offender. Since the charges against him are misdemeanors, Womack would eventually be eligible for the restoration of his peace officer certification. Womack does face federal criminal charges and federal lawsuits filed by three of his victims, but it’s likely that most, if not all, of the trouble he faces would be made to disappear once the first state case against him is closed.

After he was arraigned, Womack was compelled to surrender his passport and to avoid contact with the victims. However, he has been free during the legal proceedings. During a court hearing in early May, Womack – surrounded by family and other supportive spectators – “waited for the judge to call his case sitting in a back room of the court, shrouded by blinds that court workers said [are] typically reserved for victims who do not want to be seen by defendants,” reported the Salt Lake Tribune.

 

Check into the Creep Motel, Womack.

In other words, the impenitent predator was dealt with as if he were the victim, cosseted and sheltered and treated with gentle deference. He has been allowed to remain at large despite the fact that at least one of the victims, Brigham City resident Holly Griffin, said that she was afraid of retaliation by Womack “because he had my address.”

Griffin’s fears were amply justified. During a traffic stop not far from her home, Womack – in what would emerge as his modus operandi – claimed that Griffin was wanted on a narcotics warrant, and would be handcuffed and taken to the county jail unless she submitted to an invasive inspection for tattoos, piercings, and other identifiers.

“When he returned to my car [after getting the driver’s license and registration], he explained that there was a warrant out for me in Summit County,” Griffin told the Salt Lake City ABC affiliate. “I told him I had not been to Summit County in a few years and that I had never done anything wrong in my life.”

Womack presented Griffin with two options: Submit to a partial strip search, or go to jail. When she requested that a female officer conduct the search, Womack replied that none was available. 

“He asked me to life up my shirt up to my bra, lift down my pants to expose my upper thigh, and to show my lower leg,” the victim recounts. After she had satisfied the armed stranger’s demands, Womack released her without issuing a citation or a warning. Understandably traumatized by her experience, Griffin didn’t file a complaint – until after another victim, 18-year-old Tamsen Reid, filed a federal lawsuit against Womack and Box Elder County.

On November 20, 2010, Reid – who was 17 at the time – was one of five teenagers in a car that was stopped by Womack during a snowstorm. Womack claimed that the driver was speeding. After noticing that one of the teens was smoking, Womack ordered the driver and the passengers out of the car to search the vehicle for drugs. 

After running the IDs of the five teenagers, Womack claimed that three of them – all of them young women, wouldn’t you know – had outstanding drug warrants in other jurisdictions. He had Reid and her female friends stand barefoot in the snow while lifting up their shirts and their bras, ostensibly to search for drugs.

 

Speaking out: Tamsen Reid.

For some reason, the costumed creeper took a special interest in Reid. Womack claimed that Reid was wanted in that state for heroin possession. This led the young woman, who had not been to Arizona and had never done heroin, to suggest that she might be the victim of identity theft. 

Displaying the affected solicitude of a practiced molester, Womack told the frightened girl that she could clear things up right away, if she would simply get into his patrol vehicle and undress so he could inspect her for distinctive tattoos and piercings. Her only other alternative was to be handcuffed and booked into jail. 

Terrified, and most likely nauseous, Reid complied. This prompted the predator to escalate his demands: He claimed that it was necessary for the teenager to spread her legs in order for him to determine if she had a distinctive tattoo in her genital region. At that point, Reid finally rebelled, telling the perverted stranger that the examination was over. Womack issued a warning to the driver, and the teenagers went on their way.

At the time, Reid later recalled, the teens were relieved, rather than outraged, because nobody got a ticket.

Womack's comrades at the BCSO.

 About ten months later, following her 18^th birthday, Reid contacted the Box Elder Sheriff’s Office to have the spurious drug warrant removed from her record. The clerk with whom Reid spoke informed her that there was no warrant, and never had been. 

Reid also found out that Womack didn’t file a record of the traffic stop or the warning he had issued to the driver. She was also told that her that several other complaints had been received about Womack’s behavior. 

Shortly after Reid filed a lawsuit against Box Elder County, Womack was allowed to “leave employment” at the Sheriff’s Office – but he was permitted to keep his law enforcement certification until the lawsuit was made public. By that time it had been known, for more than a year, that Womack was in the habit of conducting undocumented traffic stops in which he neither filed reports nor turned on his dashcam recorder. 

In the August 2011 press conference announcing her lawsuit, Reid insisted that, however inexplicably, she still “believed in law enforcement,” but that her experience left her experiencing nightmares that would cause her to “wake up screaming.” 

The indelible trauma experienced by Reid and Womack’s other victims could easily have turned out even worse if any of them had put up even the slightest physical resistance to the deputy’s sexual assaults. 

Reid, who was undressed and alone in Deputy Aqualung’s Creepmobile, might consider herself to be blessed: If Womack had decided not to let the victim leave after she refused to undergo a genital examination, Reid most likely would have been arrested for resisting arrest and “assaulting” the sexual predator who had detained her.

Womack is hardly the first uniformed sociopath to force females to disrobe at gunpoint. In 2009, the City of Scottsdale, Arizona hit up local tax victims to pay a $315,000 settlement to a 19-year-old woman who was the victim of a similar sexual assault by former Police officer Chong Kim. In that case, the 19-year-old made the mistake of calling the police for “help” with intruders in her apartment. When Chong arrived, he noticed that the teenager had been drinking, a fact that he used as leverage to order her to “get naked.” After that woman filed a complaint, it was discovered that Chong had committed similar crimes against as many as 20 other women. Chong was forced to resign. There is no record of him being prosecuted for his crimes. 

Under SB 131, the newly enacted Utah law on “battering” a law enforcement officer, a future victim of a similar sexual assault by a cop – and there will be others – could be charged with a felony if she tries to escape. 

 

Sweet and Innocent -- and misled: Sen. Osmond (r.) with students.

During a February 7 Utah Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on SB 131, State Senator Aaron Osmond explained that he filed the bill in response to a “constituent request” from a police officer in his district. Osmond recruited four students from Copper Hills High School to serve as “co-presenters” of the bill. 

Each of these earnest young people dutifully recited pious platitudes about the sterling nobility of the state’s armed enforcement caste, the 

all-encompassing danger in which they constantly find themselves, the vulgar ingratitude of those who would criticize them, and the moral obligation of the public “to protect them” (yes, one witness actually used those words). 

The last witness, a young woman named Allison (whose last name I will not mention), denounced “aggressors” who would do injury to “the heroes who promote our well-being every day…. Let’s do all we can to increase the safety of our honorable officers.” 

Dear Allison: Have you met Tamsen Reid? I’m sure she would be interested in having a chat with you about the uniformed hero who was so zealous to promote Reid’s “well-being” that he tried to force her, at gunpoint, to undergo an unauthorized gynecological exam in his patrol vehicle. 

 

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Terror Cartel Strikes in Idaho

During a May 15 visit to Stockholm, Secretary of State John Kerry warned Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad that if he doesn’t begin preparations to abdicate his office, “the opposition will be receiving additional support … and unfortunately the violence will not end.”

Under the rhetorical conventions governing the cynical profession called “diplomacy,” Kerry wasn’t allowed to make his threat explicit. Fortunately, Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker labors under no such restrictions.

“I do think we’ll be arming the opposition shortly,” Corker told CBS News on May 7, referring to a measure that will be put before the Senate next week. 

While alluding to the fact that Washington is already covertly arming the Syrian insurgents, Corker made it clear that the military aid wouldn’t be restricted to rebel groups that have already been housebroken, explaining that “we have to change the equation” because “the moderate opposition groups we support are not as good at fighting” as the more ruthless factions that specialize in terrorizing non-combatants, executing prisoners, and whose leaders mutilate and cannibalize the dead bodies of their enemies.

It is impossible for Washington to provide military or “humanitarian” assistance to the Syrian insurgency without materially aiding hyper-violent factions such as the Jabhat al-Nursah, which is listed on the State Department’s roster of terrorist organizations. 

Under federal law, providing material aid of any kind – from money to shaving cream to ammunition – to a listed terrorist group is a felonious offense. A few years ago, the regime sentenced a Long Island cable TV operator named Javed Iqbal to 69 months in prison because his cable system broadcast programs produced by a network owned by Hezbollah. 

Iqbal was imprisoned as punishment for allowing words spoken in support of a listed terrorist group to be broadcast through his cable system – yet high-ranking officials in the same regime that sent him to prison are openly discussing their plans to arm Syrian Jihadists.

On May 16, the same regime that is providing support to Syrian terrorists conducted a raid in Boise to arrest an Uzbek national named Fazluddin Kurbanov, who has been accused of providing material support to a listed terrorist group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). As headline bait, the Feds also charged Kurbanov with possessing components of a “weapon of mass destruction,” which in this case appears to be a homemade hand grenade. 

Federal prosecutors, including Wendy Olson, the hyper-ambitious legal commissarina assigned to Idaho, insist that the public was never at danger, because Kurbanov had been under surveillance for a long time, and the threat he posed had been contained. This means we should anticipate the all-but-inevitable disclosure that Kurbanov was being manipulated by an undercover operative working as a “terrorism facilitator” on behalf of the regime.

As we should expect, the IMU is a violent group whose objectives are not entirely laudable. This doesn’t make them a threat to our country, however. In fact, their chief grievance is one most Americans would find understandable: They want to overthrow a fetid police state run by a Communist gangster.

A profile of the group published by the Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth recounts how the IMU grew out of a private security group that was created by Uzbek businessmen in the early 1990s. It was originally a non-ideological, non-sectarian self-defense organization that protected citizens and business owners against criminal syndicates that grew out of the Communist nomenklatura. 

By 1991, the group had fallen under the leadership of a young mullah named Tahir Yuldashev, who gave it an explicitly Muslim character and – with the help of a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan – organized it into a private police force. In December of that year, the group occupied the local Communist Party headquarters in Namagan. 

Thinking he could intimidate the group into dispersing, Uzbek Communist Party leader Islam Karimov paid a personal visit to Namagan – only to be publicly humiliated by Yuldashev, who refused to back down. This earned the IMU the undying enmity of Karimov, who banned the group and declared war on it when he became the ruler of Uzbekistan following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Karimov, a Stalin-grade despot, remains in power today. As one would expect from a product of the Soviet ruling elite, Karimov is sustained in his rule by secret police who were trained by the Soviet KGB. This has made Karimov’s regime a very useful subcontractor for Washington in its war against – well, anybody impudent enough to challenge its claims to unqualified global supremacy. Terrorists willing to serve Washington's interests -- whether they are Syrian insurrectionists or practitioners of state terrorism, like Karimov -- enjoy protection as part of Washington's official terror cartel

The KGB-constructed dungeons in Uzbekistan have been – and, for all we know, continue to be – prime destinations for people abducted by the CIA for the purpose of prolonged detention and torture. 

During the reign of Bush the Lesser, Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Tashkent, exposed his government’s collaboration in the CIA’s torture program in Uzbekistan. This led to Murray losing his job and enduring the kind of focused persecution reserved for public servants who publicly condemn the criminal actions of their employers.

“If you are put into prison in Uzbekistan,” wrote Murray after he was purged by his government, “the chances of coming out again alive are less than even. And most of the prisons are still the old Soviet gulags in the most literal sense.” 

A few weeks into his term as British ambassador, Murray attended a show trial of an elderly man who had been tortured into confessing involvement with al-Qaeda, and implicating his nephew as well. This totalitarian auto-da-fe, he recalls, was staged “for the benefit of the American embassy to demonstrate the strength of the U.S.-Uzbek alliance against terrorism.”

To Karimov’s embarrassment, and the discomfiture of his invited guests, the victim refused to follow the script. Summoning the heroic strength of an innocent man with nothing to lose, the frail defendant defiantly told the tribunal: “This is not true. This is not true. They tortured my children in front of me until I signed this. I had never heard of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.”

Karimov and his comrades had hoped to offer a gift to their new patrons in Washington in the form of a broken and contrite “terrorist” whose confession would demonstrate the efficiency of their interrogation program. Instead they had to be content with dragging this pitiful old man outside the courtroom to be shot.

According to Ambassador Murray, Karimov’s secret police frequently make use of beatings, whippings, and genital mutilation. Asphyxiation, “usually by putting a gas mask on people and blocking the air vents until they suffocated,” is another favorite method, Murray reports as well as  “rape with objects, rape with bottles, anal rape, homosexual rape, heterosexual rape, and mutilation of children in front of their parents.”

Murray has described the case of a man named Muzafar Avazzov, who was submerged in boiling liquid after being beaten and having his fingernails ripped from his hands by Karimov’s CIA-allied secret police. He was hardly the only detainee who was murdered by being boiled alive. 

After learning of these atrocities, Murray compiled a large dossier and expressed his outrage to his superiors – only to be rebuked for being “over-focused on human rights.” This led the ambassador to send a deputy to the CIA station chief to deliver a formal protest. The U.S. functionary deflected criticisms by boasting about the quality of the “intelligence that had been extracted through torture, and by reciting the familiar claim that torture is a trivial concern “in the context of the war on terror.”

Significantly, the U.S. government designated the IMU a terrorist group in 2005 – at the height (or depth) of official cooperation with Karimov’s torture-state, which in that year conducted a bloody operation to suppress dissent that left several hundred people dead. 

None of the U.S. officials who collaborated with Karimov’s KGB-trained torturers has been punished. It’s not clear whether that collaboration continues today. Now that the regime in Washington simply assassinates people through drone strikes, it may no longer have use for such crude methods of intelligence collection. 

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is a violent and dangerous group, but it has never posed a measurable threat to the safety of Americans. The same is probably true of Fazladdin Kurbanov. However, this is emphatically not true of the regime whose secret police operatives kept Kurbanov under surveillance in his Boise apartment.

Following Kurbanov’s arrest, Boise-area talk radio programs resounded with ritualistic recitals of the prescribed talking points: We must remain “vigilant” and incurably suspicious of our neighbors – especially dusky-skinned people with exotic surnames – because our enemies are implacable, endlessly devious, and incurably determined to dominate us or murder everyone who resists. We don’t yet have reason to believe this description applies to Kurbanov. However, it does make a perfect fit for the government that is prosecuting him for the crime of seeking to undermine a ruler who is a prominent member of Washington's officially sanctioned terror cartel.

Dum spiro, pugno!