Not surprisingly, Registan_net (I believe that Twitter account is manned by Nathan Hamm, a defense analyst) furiously countered my critique of their handling of the claims of two students that they were interrogated, intimidated and recruited by the Uzbek SNB (the successor to the KGB).

Just to rehearse the links:

Registan reports the harassment of two Jizzakh activists who took part in US exchanges.

I question why they are essentially accomplishing the regime's work for it by enabling the news of that repression to intimidate others, but without any pushback from their side.

Sarah Kendzior then appears with her meta-discussion about how fear and paranoia about the SNB permeates the discourse, and fails to concede that the SNB may actually in fact execute such hoaxes and disinformation campaigns.

I call her on her virtualization of the problem to such an extent that she doesn't concede the real problem nor push back on it –  and fails to condemn the regime enablers in the comments who savage the two students.

I basically think they did three things wrong at Registan_net on this story:

1. They haven't subjected these stories to any basic questioning or fact-checking or construction of alternate hypotheses which they should do as academics, and which any human rights investigator would insist on doing. There are basic questions to ask about two people claiming repression — why are they publicizing this claim now if they have relatives who may be harmed in Uzbekistan? if they decided to go ahead anyway, are they applying for political asylum? Is their statement credible? (It appears to be). What US authorities have they approached? Is the State Department going to protest this?

2. Instead, these academics and defense contractors and think-tankers are trying to achieve a kind of "rough justice by blogging" — letting these people tell their story for the use of academics in their dissertations, but not doing any human rights defense of them. Note: the thesis of Kendzior and Pearce is that activists' telling of their tales of repression on the Internet reduce Internet use and delay even incremental reform.

Sarah Kendzior is claiming that the student himself feels he has been given a voice denied him in Uzbekistan (and I dare say in State Department programs!) via the outlet of Registan. Is she going to do more than exploit the story for her dissertation, enjoy the traffic hits on Registan, acquire the reputational points and the Atlantic magazine reprints by using this story? Or will she really speak up for these people?

3. In publicizing this incident (which I'm all for doing) there are two very bad-faith frames to the act:

a) they let regime sympathizers go unchallenged — who even deny they function as such regime enablers — so that they can repeatedly and savagely attack these students and accuse them of merely cooking up asylum claims opportunistically or worse; b) they essentially willy-nilly let the regime accomplish its mission of intimidating the Internet by leaving the Uzbek regime and State Department unchallenged. They lurch on to the next sensation.

There is something else they could do, and something that academics do all the time, and something that even some of them do on certain pet causes like opposing SOPA/PIPA (a Google-inspired campaign which they're happy to teach in their classes with Silicon Valley-generated Infographics).

And that "something" is mounting a petition to the Uzbek government and to the State Department, condemning the questioning and intimidation of these two students and insisting that the US promote freedom of academic and citizen exchange and defend participants in it.

If they aren't willing to do this publicly, they could at least write to State Department officials quietly — after all, don't they all have a stake in keeping exchange with Central Asia free and open?!

It occurred to me that a key reason we have had such an awful several years of demoralizing and diminishing academic and civic exchange with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and others is because these regimes are able to get away with murder and nobody ever publicly protests what they do.

Turkmenistan in particular has decimated the number of Peace Corps volunteers, they've kicked out international NGOs or forced them to leave like Doctors without Borders and Counterparts; they've stopped professional medical exchanges literally at the airport; they denied hundreds of students ready to board planes and kept them languishing in bureaucratic limbo for years.

And all this happened without a public peep from our academic or US-funded exchange communities. Of course, some of these US-funded organizations literally have 50 years of accommodationist history with these Soviet and post-Soviet regimes to keep their visas and programs intact, although since the collapse of the USSR, they have become significantly more free and challenged the authoritarian governments.

But these two hard cases of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have seen serious encroachments into exchange with not a single public protest from their participants. That's understandable in these countries; it's unforgiveable in the US.

Why is it in an era of Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring and marches in Moscow, that academics on Registan, and the NGOs related to these two students in Uzbekistan, and other NGOs and US-funded agencies curtailed in their work, whether FLEX or Peace Corps or whatever, aren't going to change.org and publicizing a petition? Why aren't the ambassadors in these countries or the State Department making vocal protests?

The answer is simple: they fear worse retaliation, so they keep the silence they've kept for years in the hopes it will get better.  But any victim of these countries' regimes who has been told to "be quiet and it will go better for them" can surely explain to them that the claim doesn't work — cases and issues are virtually never resolved in these countries by quiet diplomacy. Where quiet diplomacy has been used to good effect, it's always because outside the negotiation room, there are people willing to picket and make sacrifices to publicly protest. That's an incredibly important ingredient that the quiet diplomats need to remember.

FLEX has gotten a beat-down now from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in a public way, as  chrono-tm.org, my blog, and Registan have publicized intimidation of FLEX students. I'm confident it's only the tip of the iceberg in terms of incidents of repression which we've all heard about.

So the State Department should be now a) researching these cases to see if the facts are correct and correctly interpreted [I'm not 100% sure that they are] and b) protesting this publicly, as quiet diplomacy at this part on exchange just isn't working. Hundreds of people were affected with Turkmenistan recently; when Uzbekistan kicked out all the international NGOs hundreds were affected then.

Isn't it time to do a little more about this?

I think it is. If you have reached the point with FLEX that Turkmen officials deliberately sabotage applicants by staging alternative competitions on the very day of the FLEX exams and also interrogate teachers about why they let their students try out for FLEX; if students in Uzbekistan are intimidated taking part in FLEX or other NGO activities with what surely amounts to legitimate and even mild speech about human rights, then maybe if the Uzbek regime won't stop harassing people, it's time to close FLEX?

The regime has to understand that not only their own children and the golden youth serving the regime who get to be in these programs — others a bit less loyal will end up in them too. If they aren't going to tolerate the modicum of freedom involved in academic and NGO civic exchange — exchange that hardly threatens to turn these countries into Arab Spring repeats! — then they shouldn't get to go on basking in the legitimacy that such exchanges give them in the international arena.

Again, I really do think it's time to go public with the protest about this. What Registan has done is gone public with the recount of the intimidation but without the condemntation and protest. They aren't calling on the Uzbek government or State to do anything about it. That's what I feel is wrong. Nathan Hamm may feel he shouldn't be required to join a protest about academic and citizen exchange freedom and  he "does what he can." I think I'm right to go on challenging him and his colleagues to do the right thing here, because otherwise, they leave Registan open as an open-source active measure, available for the regime's use or anyone else's opportunistic use at any time to intimidate people.