Elections, fair:
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak received nearly 89 percent of the vote in the election. The president [Bush] called Mubarak on September 10 to congratulate him and to say he looks forward to continuing to work with him, according to the White House statement.
And not:
The US derided Syria's Bashar al-Assad overnight for claiming to have won a second seven-year mandate as president in a referendum boycotted by the opposition.
"I think it's pretty hard to suggest that any kind of election can be free, fair or credible when you've only got one candidate and that candidate receives about 98 per cent of the vote," said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.
Fair:
George W. Bush was quick to congratulate Mubarak on his election victory, even though only 23 percent of Egypt's 32 million registered voters (out of a population of some 75 million people) turned out to cast their ballots -- a fact that, in other countries, would likely be seen as weakening the winner's sense of a mandate.
And not:
Only 25 percent of Venezuela's 14 million voters participated in the elections, according to the National Electoral Council. [...]
"Given the rate of abstention, plus expressions of concerns by prominent Venezuelans, we would see that this reflects a broad lack of confidence in the impartiality and transparency of the electoral process, which is worth noting," State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said.
As Noam Chomsky has said (with characteristic insight), the U.S. judges elections not by process but by outcome. If the candidate backed by Washington wins, the election is by definition free and fair regardless of the process--and vice versa.
Here's just one of the reasons that Mubarak is the apple of Washington's eye:
In 2005, Egypt's prime minister acknowledged that since 2001 the USA had transferred some 60-70 detainees to Egypt as part of the "war on terror".
The report details the case of Abu Omar, an Egyptian resident in Italy who was allegedly kidnapped by CIA agents in Italy in 2003 and handed over to the Egyptian authorities.
Abu Omar was held without charge in Egyptian jails for nearly four years and in testimony given to an Italian prosecutor he has alleged that he was whipped, subjected to electric shocks and raped.
He was never successfully charged and was released in February 2007.
Oddly, the more that a candidate is willing (and in Mubarak's case, eager) to use the powers of his brutal police state to do the U.S.'s bidding, the freer and fairer his election becomes.
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