Oligarch's Friends in High Places

The Craig Murray documents have made for some sober reading these last few days. They're not exactly light holiday fare. The leak of Murray's letters has been flying around the blogs but, as usual, the documents have been little noticed by the mainstream press in this country.

There was, however, a small passage in one letter that pricked my eye. Taken out of context, any reader would be hard to pressed to know which country was being described without a familiarity with the larger set of letters:

The purpose of his regime is not the development of his country but the diversion of economic rent to his oligarchic supporters through government controls.

This sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? But to ease the potential confusion about the regime Murray is describing here, I'll clarify that it is not the Bush administration but that of Uzbekistan's ruthless people-boiler-in-chief, Islam Karimov.

For anyone who may have some doubts about the applicability of this statement to the Bush administration, I would highly recommend the recent piece by Klinenberg and Frank, Looting Homeland Security.

the Department of Homeland Security, the arm of the federal government responsible for ensuring our safety in times of national emergency, has become little more than an arm of big business

It makes for even more brutal, infuriating reading. There is a lot of that these days.