CBS has this headline about civil unrest in a country not the USA.
U.S. Ally Fires On Its PeopleLet me see if I can guess which US ally would that be. Hmmm. Australia, Japan or the UK? Or maybe it’s France, Germany or Spain. (They are still calling themselves allies of ours, right?) Or perhaps it's El Salvador; or Estonia. Or Mexico. Or India.
Say what? Uzbekistan? Oh, okay.
Thousands of terrified Uzbeks waiting to flee across the border into Kyrgyzstan stormed government buildings, torched police cars and attacked border guards Saturday in a second day of violence spawned by an uprising against the iron-fisted rule of U.S.-allied President Islam Karimov.Can’t beat the irony of having that given name.
The Uzbek leader blamed Islamic extremists for the revolt and said his troops were forced to shoot demonstrators Friday as they tried to break through police lines. Witnesses counted more than 200 civilians dead.Do you suppose that CBS has a point in stressing the Uzbek president’s alliance with the US while his country is in turmoil and Islamic extremists are allegedly to blame? Is a major American news organization trying to stir up even more anti-Americanism in the Muslim world?
Nah. That could never happen, even if most people will only read the title and the first paragraph of this article. /sarc
Anyway, this looks like another ugly 'he-said, he-said' with dead civilians thrown in for good measure.
Karimov said Saturday that authorities tried to negotiate a peaceful way out but would not yield to the protesters' demand for freedom for all their followers across the Valley. He termed that demand excessive.[SNIP]He said troops were forced to open fire when demonstrators who seized a government building attempted to break through an advancing line of Uzbek police and soldiers. The Uzbek leader also denied that forces targeted innocent civilians. [SNIP]
But protest leader Kabuljon Parpiyev said Interior Minister Zakir Almatov did not sound willing to negotiate in a Friday phone call."He said, 'We don't care if 200, 300 or 400 people die. We have force and we will chuck you out of there anyway,"' Parpiyev quoted Almatov as saying.
(Thanks to LGF)
AFTERTHOUGHT: I wonder why we didn’t see this headline from CBS a couple of summers ago:
