Our "Friend" Mubarak is NOT Alone: Here are 7 of the Worst Dictators we are backing:

Joshua Holland reminds us that there others beside Mubarak who give our country a very, very BAD name. When I served as the Intelligence Operations Officer of our 4th US Armored Division in Goeppingen, Germany, Steve Mayfield, a CIA man who wanted me to spy for us in (then East Germany, related his tour of duty in Jordan: If our country wanted to kill someone in that country, we would hire a thug who could afford a knife, and point out the target of his "company". But I digress: In Cameroon, Our Paul Biya, who has ruled that country, since "winning" an election by getting 99 percent of the vote, was one of our "friends". Together, while in the UN Security council in 2002, Cameroon and OUR United States worked together on a number of initiatives. While the US government provided substantial funding for international financial institutions. As part of a strategy to stifle opposition, the "authorities" perpetrated or condoned human rights violations including arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions and restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. Human rights defenders and journalists were harassed and threatened. Men and women were detained because of their sexual orientation.
Please click on my headline to read the other atrocities of our "allies", including Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Uzbekistan, and Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia by Joshua Holland, an editor and senior writer at Alternet. He is the author of "The 15 biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.