God, how I love a good international espionage/thriller novel with edge-of-your-seat twists and turns.And I love it even more if it's actually true.
Meet Craig Murray, an ousted British Ambassador to Uzbekistan who fell in love with an Uzbek um, dancer, and hear stories of torture where they, um, boil people alive.
Here's an article on the whole sorid yet edge-of-your-seat (yeah, I'm too lazy to look up 'captivating' in the theasurus) drama.
In a nutshell, this is what the drama is all about: (before I start.. I should mention that the article states "Uzbekistan sits in the cold, rough heart of Central Asia, shaped like a jagged bit of shrapnel from the explosion of the Soviet Union." I seemed to have overlooked that when I was drawing my 'sitting camel', 'happy crab' 'dead bird' outlines from Uzbekistan.)
Okay... back to the synopsis:
The British Ambassabor, after learning that the regime there, at the urging of the US and UK, allegedly boils a man to his death, visits a strip club in Tashkent. A stripper, who becomes the star of this story wonders '"Who is that old foreigner? Does he have any money?' The Ambassador, in his memoirs recalls that day slightly different: "As I caught her glance, I felt she was drawing me into her very soul," he writes in his 2006 memoir, "Murder in Samarkand" (called "Dirty Diplomacy" in the 2007 U.S. edition). "She looked lost and anxious, like she really didn't want to be there. She defied the impossible by exuding, at the same time, such ripe sexual attraction and such innocent vulnerability. Her body invited sex while her eyes screamed, 'Save me.'"
(my notes: hey perverted old man... you're in a frigging strip club. Of course there's going to be the sexual tension dripping through the air.)
In any case, according to the article, "He tucked $20 into her embroidered panties, walked away from his wife and two children and brought his belly dancer to London to start a new life together." (note: even I don't have embroidered panties. Mine are boringly plain. Anyhoo... back to the story.)
Fast forward through the debauchery and being caught for trading sex for visas - the Ambassador is fired. He claims this was done not because of his non-Ambassador-like behavior but because he stumbled upon the American "extraordinary rendition" program, whereby terror suspects are flown for questioning to countries where they can, um, boil people.
Oh yeah.. who doesn't love a good story of sex, greed, international politics, and human stewpots. This will make for some good bedtime reading for my and Babyluv.
