The indispensable Craig Murray

December 31st, 2005 at 19:32 Björn Hallberg

Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan and torture whistleblower has ignored the Foreign Office ban and released several full-text documents relating to his experiences there. It seems clear that Britain knowingly supported the policies of the Uzbek government, and extracted more or less useless information from the deal, despite claiming not to. It matters little since their flimsy denials speak for themselves. It would require close to dereliction of duty and plain incompetence for the UK officials not to have known what was going on.

As Henry Wotton, Sr (1568-1639) once put it: “An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.” Thankfully, that was more than Murray could stomach. Fortunately for all of us there are those that remain incorruptible still.

UPI - The British government was accused Friday of lying over its connivance at the use of torture by one of its own ambassadors.

Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, has posted on his personal website a series of documents that the British government sought to suppress and that appear to buttress his charges.

They include a document signed by the legal adviser to Britain’s Foreign Office, Sir Michael Wood, which denies that it is “an offence under the U.N. Convention on Torture to receive or possess information under torture.”

The documents also include a formal memo to his superiors at the Foreign Office in which Murray states the reason why the British continued to accept intelligence from Uzbekistan that had been acquired as a result of torturing detainees.

Perhaps most interesting, Murray has managed to whip up quite a roar in the online community and turned it against the British government. The Foreign Office has until now blocked the release of Murray’s book based on references to above documents. So even if most of the content is already known to the public, it is not the same as saying that the publishing is redundant. Those claiming that would also be claiming that the Foreign Office is redundant. Democracy at work.

Thankfully, Murray has also been abundantly clear in his upcoming book and pointed out that it was in fact Clinton, as most of us know, that started using the practise of renditions and overtly supported the dungeons of Uzbekistan since 1998. In fact, for those of us not stricken by amnesia, it seems clear that Clinton was not the wishy-washy liberal that some wish he was and his political adversaries lambast him for supposedly being. In fact, in America, everyone is a crook it seems. Don’t worry. We’re not forgetting you America. But purging Europe and hanging the collaborators and spies so that the EU is free from foreign entanglement is more important even than crushing the US.

See also:
Ex-envoy unleashes blog-based attack on UK’s torture denials
Blair on Extraordinary Rendition: The Lying Liar and the Lies he tells
Various posts on Bloggerheads

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