Since September 11, the Bush Administration has made the distribution of security assistance a centerpiece of his "War on Terrorism."

In its haste to strengthen the "frontline" states' ability to confront transnational terrorist threats on their soil, and to gain the cooperation of regimes of geostrategic significance to the next phases of the "War on Terrorism", the administration is disregarding normative restrictions on U.S. aid to human rights abusers.

The list below highlights this tradeoff by juxtaposing data on increases in military aid to the administration's allies in its global war on terror with excerpts from the State Department's recently released reports on human rights.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN A LUNACY FAR, FAR AWAY

1. Imagine an election in a third-world country in which the self-declared winner was the moronic son of the former president -- and imagine that the former president was himself the former head of that nation's secret police. 2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote, but won based on some fucked old colonial holdover from the nation's pre-democratic past. 3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's "victory" turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother. 4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district - a district heavily favouring the self-declared winner's opponent -- led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate. 5. Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste of former slaves, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy. 6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police, operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother. 7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province, and that the self-declared winner's "lead" was only 327 votes -- fewer, certainly, than the vote-counting machines' margin of error. 8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful, by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province, or in its most hotly disputed district. 9. Imagine that the self-declared winner was himself a governor of a major province, and that his province had the worst human-rights record of any province in his nation, leading the nation in executions. 10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human-rights violators to positions on the high court of that nation. You can open your eyes now!

I seen it. I was watching.

What the fuck do you think?