British bloggers are risking a lot by getting this information out. In my own modest way, I have to help. I ran across this at Boing Boing:
Ignoring UK Ban, bloggers publish leaked torture memos
The following is from a speech former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray gave in York last February, after he’d been sacked for speaking out and before the Foreign Office’s attempt to censor his forthcoming book about his experience. The telegrams are quoted in full and there are graphic descriptions of torture, carried out in the name of “democracy” and “freedom” and “the war on terror.”
But really, it’s about oil, power, and the kind of intel that tends to support high military and anti-terrorism budgets, and we’re paying for it.
Just in the last couple of days the go-ahead has been given for the construction of the pipeline to Afghanistan which will bring Central Asia’s massive gas reserves out. Uzbekistan while the dominant country in central Asia it does not have the dominant amount of hydro-carbons but in terms of military strength and population it is the dominant regional player and central Asia has enough gas to supply the Western world at present levels of consumption for at least fifty years. So this is all about power play and hydro-carbons and if that power play is best advanced by backing a dictator that’s fine so long as no-one knows about it because no-one in the West does know about it. The number of people in the West who already know the things I have told you is extremely small. You’re probably the only people in York who know anything about Uzbekistan. The Uzbek’s play their part and help the American justification for what they are doing by saying that they are an integral part in the war on terror. The main way they do this is by providing intelligence material linking the Uzbek opposition to Al-Qaeda.
In November 2002 I was sitting looking through MI6 intelligence material I saw some of which the markings indicated it was a re-release of CIA material passed on from another security service – from the text it was plain that was Uzbek. There were two intelligence reports; one about a threat to Samarqand – a city in Uzbekistan- from Tajik militants in the hills- Islamic militants who were supposedly going to sweep down and attack the city. We happened to know that this just wasn’t true- the defense attach� had been there, we knew the places, there weren’t training camps where it said there were. The second one was talking of the links between some Uzbek opposition group with Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden – it was just the same formula that I had seen before. And I started thinking now has this been got through torture? How did it get here? Where did it come from? So I said to my deputy ‘I want to go back to London and complain about this but I don’t want to make a fool of myself so could you go and see the Americans because it’s possible that they have a protocol in place to make sure that any information passed on by the Uzbek’s doesn’t come from torture. Perhaps Americans have to be present during Uzbek interrogation if the material is to be used by the Americans.’
This of course is before Abu Ghraib when I rather naively felt that having Americans present at the interrogation would prevent people being tortured as opposed to helping to facilitate it. So She went and saw the CIA head of station in Tashkent and said to him’ my boss has been worried that this intelligence might be obtained by torture’ and he said to her ’well it probably is obtained by torture – we don’t see that as a problem’ She came back and reported to me so I went back to London saying’ This material is nonsense and probably obtained by torture’ London did not actually reply.
After several attempts to get the Foreign Office to see the error of their ways, and the folly of trying to stay in good graces with the country I’m forced to call “Torturers ‘R U.S.”, Mr Murray was “sacked” (translation: “fired”) as the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and several months later he resigned entirely from the UK diplomatic corps. There’s more about him here.
And with that, here’s hoping for a happier new year.
