Complicity in torture by Craig Murray

[JohnyCanuck]

This is a recent entry from the blog of Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray was withdrawn as ambassador and eventually fired from the UK's foreign service after he kept objecting to his government not taking a stand against the horrendous torture practiced by the Uzbek regime on suspected opponents and suspected Al Quiada captives. Needless to say, the totalitarian Uzbek regime was a valued US/UK ally in the "never to end in our lifetimes" supposed war on terror:

Complicity in Torture

by craig on Jan 12th in Uncategorized

So nobody in the security services was guilty of complicity in torture. Those rendered to torture were in fact whisked off by flying pigs. Or maybe a big boy did it and ran away.

I should say I never had the tiniest bit of doubt that the institutionally corrupt Metropolitan Police would let off the security services. Nobody ever is guilty in these things. It was nobody’s fault that an unarmed and unresisting electrician was shot six times in the head as he sat on a tube train. It was nobody’s fault the police subsequently lied about him. It is nobody’s fault that MI5 and MI6 officers were interviewing detainees with freshly mutilated genitals. It was nobody’s fault that, when I blew the whistle on active UK complicity in torture, I was immediately suspended from duty and charged with eighteen allegations of gross misconduct, every one of which was subsequently adjudged to be false. It was nobody’s fault that David Kelly died a horrible, lonely and mysterious death after letting slip the truth – that there were no Iraqi WMD. It was nobody’s fault that hundreds of thousands died and trillions were squandered due to the lies officially published – by nobody’s fault – about WMD.

I have views on this lying exoneration today which are more complex than you might expect. The MI5 and MI6 officers were following policy set out by Tony Blair and Jack Straw, that we should obtain intelligence from torture. It would have been a hollow justice for some junior spooks to be scapegoated while Straw and Blair are walking around as respected international statesman, coining in the money.

Yhe (sic) Met investigation was so remarkably “thorough” it did not approach me at any stage, even though I had given obviously relevant evidence in person to the Council of Europe, European Parliament and UK Parliament.

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/01/complicity-in-torture/
(embedded videos at link)

[JohnyCanuck]

1. "There was an appetite for false intelligence."

HOUSE OF LORDS
HOUSE OF COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
JOINT COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS
UN CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE:
ALLEGATIONS OF COMPLICITY IN TORTURE


TUESDAY 28 APRIL 2009
MR CRAIG MURRAY
PROFESSOR PHILIPPE SANDS QC

SNIP

Q87 Earl of Onslow: You tell us in your memorandum that a senior FCO official told you that the Security Services found the Uzbek intelligence received from the US to be useful. What value do you think the Security Services got from this material?

Mr Murray: I found that puzzling, and I still do, because whenever the British embassy in Tashkent was able to check it out separately against facts on the ground it never once found any of piece of intelligence that was valuable. None of it related to any security threat to the UK. It was virtually all concerned with alleged Islamist threats to President Karimov and his Government in Uzbekistan. It was quite easy to demonstrate that much of it was simply untrue. To give one example of many, there was intelligence pointing to a jihadist training camp in the hills just over the Uzbek border.

Q88 Earl of Onslow: Was this in Afghanistan?

Mr Murray: It was in Turkmenistan. My defence attaché, Col Ridout, had been to the precise co-ordinates given and knew for a fact that there was nothing there. That was fairly typical. The intelligence material was being provided to the CIA by the Uzbek Security Services and the point of it was to exaggerate the threat to the Uzbek Government in order to justify the alliance with the Karimov regime.

SNIP

Q131 Lord Dubs: Leaving aside the question whether or not your ambassadorial colleagues should have raised their concerns with you, surely did you not ask them if they were aware of this and, if so, how they felt about it?

Mr Murray: I think we did. My general point is that my ambassadorial colleagues all sympathised with the position I was in and tended to agree with me that we should not be doing this sort of thing, but they were not willing to put at risk their own careers. It was perceived that you were not allowed to disagree and if you cast any doubt on the war on terror and war in Iraq initiatives you would get your head chopped off in career terms. I would like you to consider the following seriously: I was seeing intelligence in Uzbekistan whose purpose, as I have told you, was to exaggerate the Islamic threat in central Asia. Absolutely contemporaneously with the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which exaggerated that threat, waterboarding was happening in the US which we now know was aimed largely at persuading al-Qaeda operatives to confess to a link with Iraq. There was a vogue for false intelligence and that built up the rationale for the war in Iraq, the alliance with Uzbekistan and other things.

Q132 Chairman: I think this takes us beyond our terms of reference.

Mr Murray: I do not think it does. Torture gives you false intelligence; it does not give you the truth. There was an appetite for false intelligence. (emphasis added /JC)

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/Uncorrected%20Transcript%2028%20April%2009.doc