{"id":3053,"date":"2006-10-18T08:56:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-18T15:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/10\/18\/marching-through-georgia\/"},"modified":"2006-10-18T14:58:02","modified_gmt":"2006-10-18T21:58:02","slug":"marching-through-georgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/10\/18\/marching-through-georgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Marching Through Georgia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As aspiring Georgian dictator Mikheil Saakashvili <a href=\"http:\/\/en.rian.ru\/world\/20060907\/53616994.html\">unleashes<\/a> a wave of repression aimed at opposition parties, arrests their leaders on trumped-up charges of &#8220;spying,&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/departments\/civilsociety\/articles\/eav090205.shtml\">cracks down<\/a> on the independent media, <a href=\"http:\/\/hrw.org\/doc\/?t=europe&#038;c=georgi\">tortures<\/a> his political opponents and other prisoners held in Georgia&#8217;s disgusting jails,  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.georgiafornato.ge\/Main%20Page.htm\">lobbies<\/a> hopefully for NATO membership, and <a href=\"http:\/\/english.aljazeera.net\/NR\/exeres\/B26C6CD3-1C92-494E-A1B3-AF8FFEA6A743.htm\">provokes<\/a> war with Russia, the &#8220;libertarian&#8221; Cato Institute sponsors a conference in conjunction with the Heritage Foundation and other pro-Bush thinktanks, on &#8220;Freedom, Prosperity, and Peace&#8221; in Tbilisi.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a really good sense of timing they have over at Cato: just when freedom, prosperity, and peace are conspicuous by their absence in Georgia!<\/p>\n<p>According to the announcement, &#8220;Cato is running this conference in cooperation with Kakha Bendukidze, the state minister for coordination of reforms of the Republic of Georgia.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>While they&#8217;re hob-nobbing with the Georgian commissars, the Cato-ites might want to bring up this proposed &#8220;reform&#8221;: find out who tortured former Georgian government official <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bhhrg.org\/CountryReport.asp?ChapterID=779&#038;CountryID=10&#038;ReportID=252&#038;keyword=\">Sulkhan Molashvili<\/a>, who was subjected to electro-shock treatment and whose body was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.civil.ge\/eng\/article.php?id=7434\">burned <\/a>with cigarettes when he refused to confess to his alleged &#8220;crimes.&#8221; Shortly before being arrested, Molashvili held a news conference at which he said he had in his possession document&#8217;s proving Saakashvili&#8217;s links to corruption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As aspiring Georgian dictator Mikheil Saakashvili unleashes a wave of repression aimed at opposition parties, arrests their leaders on trumped-up charges of &#8220;spying,&#8221; cracks down on the independent media, tortures his political opponents and other prisoners held in Georgia&#8217;s disgusting jails, lobbies hopefully for NATO membership, and provokes war with Russia, the &#8220;libertarian&#8221; Cato Institute [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3053"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}