Want to piss Blair and Co off? Got a website or blog? Jump in

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

The following is by a guy called James Cranch taken from his website & is the most concise summary of what's going on I could find. The original contains very good links.

This is not so much a rant, as a vehicle for some minor civil disobedience.

Craig Murray used to be the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan. He became disgusted by the ongoing, absymal human rights conditions there, and moreover by the UK government's support for Islam Karimov's regime. This seemed rather incongruous with the very same UK government's near-daily declarations of horror at Iraq, where conditions at the time were perhaps very slightly less disgraceful.

Being unable to keep his mouth shut like a good chap seems to have somehow cost him that job. He has written a book about it (which you can buy on the Internet, and which might very well one day become a film).

Together with the book, he released fifteen documents, mostly detailing Foreign Office communications relating to the matter, as primary evidence. Since they'd been released under the Freedom of Information Act, the Government can't claim they're secret.

Instead, they wrote Mr. Murray a nastygram claiming the documents were copyrighted, and imperiously demanding that he stop offering them for download. While Mr. Murray himself seems upbeat about this threat, many people have joined forces to mirror these documents.

Please mirror it yourself! Perhaps drop me an email when you've done so (I seem to have a more complete list than others I can find on the net). I can be reached with an email address consisting of cranch then an at sign then cantab then a dot then net.

http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jdc41/rants/murray.html

Sadly Craig Murray has had to remove the documents from his site. He (Craig) posted this:

"We need another Dickens"

New Labour are not as stupid as they seem. I have now had a chance to take legal advice, and that advice is as follows. To defend this case would cost the price of a London house. I don't have a house, in London or anywhere else. I am therefore obliged to give in to force majeure and remove some of the documents from my own site. This reeking government is therefore able to mask its stink on this particular miniscule corner of the internet.

Here is another piece of legal advice I received. Copyright cases cover one instance of publication in one place. Anyone else who has published any government documents that might be Crown Copyright, or not, (and I believe there are hundreds of thousands of documents on the web on which the government could, by the argument in Mr Buttrill's letter, claim copyright), is an individual case and can wait to hear from Mr Buttrill.

Force Majeure wields a two-edged sword.

Craig

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/07/we_need_another.html

There is more information and links to the documents themselves here:

http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jdc41/rants/murray.html

You can also get the files from rapidshare or YouSendIt as a 12 megabyte ZIP file to make downloading easier:

http://rapidshare.de/files/25438787/craigmurray.zip.html
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=07DECB9643F01381

and here's a torrent link via Dahr Jamail:

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/torrents/craig_murray_documents.torrent

If none of these work

The more widespread and international this gets, the better.