{"id":2944,"date":"2007-04-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2007-04-07T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-04-07T00:00:00","slug":"British Ambassador: Uzbeks Tortured Into Falsely Confessing Al-Qaeda Membership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=2944","title":{"rendered":"British Ambassador: Uzbeks Tortured Into Falsely Confessing Al-Qaeda Membership"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Interview with Craig Murray: Ex-British Ambassador to Uzbekistan<\/i><\/div>\n

Q: Could you just give an overview of your current situation? <\/p>\n

CM: I\u2019m still suspended on full pay. That\u2019s my official status, which is very peculiar. At least I\u2019m still being paid, but I think they\u2019re trying to summon up the nerve to sack me. And to do so, leaving as little comeback as possible for my lawyers to take them to court. But I\u2019m convinced my career in the Foreign Office is finished. <\/p>\n

Q: Would you want to go back? <\/p>\n

CM: I don\u2019t know. I mean, I worked for them for twenty years. Very, very successfully, on the whole. Until I went to Uzbekistan my career was a kind of model of rapid upward progress. <\/p>\n

Q: Yes, I heard you were the youngest ever British ambassador. <\/p>\n

CM: Yes, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s actually true. People say that, but I don\u2019t believe it. Certainly now, my mate James Clarke has been appointed ambassador to Luxembourg, and he\u2019s only 34 or something. But I don\u2019t think I was ever the youngest ever ambassador, but I was certainly very young for an ambassador. And particularly very young for an ambassador to a country which was of some importance. <\/p>\n

Q: In one of your first interviews as ambassador to Uzbekistan you mentioned that it was very difficult to work there. Was this something that was apparent right from the beginning, and what sort of difficulties were you facing? <\/p>\n

CM: Well, I think I\u2019ll start by saying, as far as I can gather, before I got there the British Embassy did very little at all. I recall, when I arrived the ambassador\u2019s car \u2013 the flag car \u2013 was over three years old. It had only got 10,000 km on the clock \u2013 in three years! And the embassy drivers\u2026Normally when you arrive at your post you can rely on your drivers to know where things and places are, because they\u2019re used to going there. So places like ministries and important British companies, you just assume they\u2019ll know where they are. Well, I found the embassy drivers didn\u2019t know were any of the places were, because no one in the embassy had ever been outside the walls of the compound before. This idea of travelling out, and meeting people, and doing things was kind of new to them. So that was peculiar. I remember my first week, I visited a number of British companies, I visited every British company represented in Tashkent \u2013 which isn\u2019t a great many. But several of them said they\u2019d never been visited by a British ambassador before. They nearly all said that, and BAT (British American Tobacco) was the only one that had been visited by a British ambassador before. To me, that was truly shocking. <\/p>\n

Q: Why do you think this is? <\/p>\n

CM: Because the Foreign Office is full of stuck up, lazy, out-of-touch people. That\u2019s why. I\u2019m very bitter now! But Uzbekistan is difficult because it\u2019s a very nasty, totalitarian dictatorship. It\u2019s a very efficient totalitarian dictatorship. Everything that\u2019s done is decided by central government. I recall, at one time we were arranging a cultural festival, with some concerts of British music played by a local orchestra. I was working with the orchestra on that, to help them get some examples of western-European music, because their repertoire was actually extremely limited. Their physical access to sheet music was very limited. And we discovered that anything the orchestra played had to be politically vetted as being acceptable in terms of Uzbek national ideology, which was fascinating. It was really quite amazing. It\u2019s a completely mad totalitarian society. They even banned billiards, I remember, which struck me as peculiarly off-the-wall. As from this academic year, one day a week has to be given by all schools and universities to national education, and national education comprises three things: There\u2019s Uzbek folk singing and dancing, there\u2019s a very tendentious version of history \u2013 which is called Uzbek history \u2013 and there\u2019s the study of the works of President Karimov, which is most important and the largest of the elements. It really is a weird place to live and work. It\u2019s a kind of cloud-cuckoo-land place, in which one of the things that makes it difficult is that people lie to you all the time. The government lies all the time. Officially there\u2019s an economic growth of eight and a half percent this year. In fact, anyone who knows anything about Uzbekistan knows there\u2019s been negative growth for the last several years. But it doesn\u2019t stop them throwing the official statistics at you. That\u2019s the difficult part, as westerners, to deal with people who lie to your face, because they\u2019re not used to that context. I mean, normally we take it for granted that when people say something to you they bare some approximation to the truth anyway. In Uzbekistan you can\u2019t. It\u2019s a very peculiar place to work. <\/p>\n

Q: On the subject of Karimov, he was interviewed by a Russian news agency earlier this month, and there were a number of interesting things he was saying. For example, \u201cExternal influence will be effective, only if we permit it to be effective,\u201d \u2013 what do you make of this comment? <\/p>\n

CM: Well, I think Karimov\u2019s politics are essentially paranoid. He has a paranoid view of the world, and you can see the results of that in the physical closing of borders, the detonating of bridges in the Ferganna Valley so people can\u2019t get across the border. The desire for complete control over all media and information. And anyone who meets Karimov \u2013 I\u2019ve been with many official visitors as they call on him – he always gives the same opening spiel about how Uzbekistan is surrounded by enemies, how it\u2019s hemmed in by the narcotics trade, the Mafia, by the Russians, by gangsters, by Chinese goods which carry influenza! He has a paranoid worldview, and I think that this dislike of the outside world is very notable. I don\u2019t at all buy his argument that \u201cwe can\u2019t have a western-style democracy in Uzbekistan\u201d. Who says democracy\u2019s western? India\u2019s a democracy. <\/p>\n

Q: Yes, that\u2019s another thing he said in the interview, he said \u2018the process of becoming a democracy will take years, and someone will surely volunteer to hurry us up. That is something, however, where undue haste will be harmful\u2019\u2026Hasn\u2019t this been proved in Iraq? I mean, how can the western countries be of benefit to the Uzbekistan? <\/p>\n

CM: Well, I think the argument that democracy isn\u2019t possible, it\u2019s difficult in some way, or not native to Uzbekistan is an argument you only hear put forward by very rich people. I\u2019ve never heard a poor man say: \u201cWe can\u2019t have democracy here.\u201d The people who benefit from a lack of democracy, particularly Karimov, who\u2019s a totalitarian dictator who\u2019s collected hundreds of millions of dollars, stolen from the people. And his daughter has possibly even stolen more than him. <\/p>\n

Q: Yes, could you tell me about his daughter, does she have some official government position? <\/p>\n

CM: Yes, well her official government position is as economic adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, but she\u2019s benefited hugely from the so-called privatization process. She\u2019s also been heavily involved in the negotiations for Gazprom (Russian gas company) to take the Uzbek gas fields, which were carved up between herself and a chap called Alisha Asmanov, who\u2019s an ethnic Uzbek living in Russia. He\u2019s the guy who bought a very large section of what used to be British Steel \u2013 he\u2019s quite a well-known Mafia-type of figure. And she made a lot of money out of, for example, the mobile telephone contracts in Uzbekistan \u2013 Uzdunrobita the company\u2019s called. She owned a 50% stake in that company and that was sold out to some Russians for about $400 million earlier this year. It wasn\u2019t worth vaguely that, I mean what precisely the corrupt deal behind that was no one knows because it wasn\u2019t worth nearly that. She still has a stake, of course, in Cocoa Cola Uzbekistan, which led to a famous row when she had a divorce. She\u2019s been heavily involved in trafficking women. She owns a \u2018travel\u2019 agency, which she owns jointly with one of the younger sons of the Emir of Dubai, and that agency can issue visas for the United Arab Emirates. The travel agency itself can issue visas, and they\u2019ve been involved in trafficking tens of thousands of Uzbek women to Dubai to work as prostitutes. That\u2019s been a very profitable line for her. I bet your editor won\u2019t dare to publish that! <\/p>\n

Q: We\u2019ll see, it depends what kind of mood she\u2019s in. Obviously the main reason for you leaving was that you spoke out against the torture situation. There were reports of prisoners having their nails ripped out and being boiled alive. Are such extreme cases a rarity, or are they quite systematic? <\/p>\n

CM: It\u2019s completely systematic, and not rare at all. Thousands of people are tortured every year, undoubtedly. Attention always focuses when people are tortured to death, but that\u2019s a tiny minority of the cases. The people who are torturing are doing so to extract information and confessions usually. In the cases of the guys who were boiled to death, they were trying to get them to sign a recantation of their faith, which is a slightly different situation. Most of the torture goes on to try to extract so-called confessions. But the last thing the torturer wants is a dead person. It gives them a lot of explaining to do, and you can\u2019t get any more information out of them, they can\u2019t sign anything when they\u2019re dead. So the torture deaths only happen by accident in a tiny minority of the cases. There are thousands of cases every year of people being tortured. In the Uzbek courts, in both political and criminal cases, the conviction rate is over 99%. Over 99% of people who come to court are found guilty. I know that the conviction rate\u2019s over 99%, it\u2019s not a kind of estimate. We did a project on court reporting, where we worked with a lot of courts throughout the country for a couple of years. Now I can\u2019t give you as precise a figure, but in over 90% of cases \u2013 and I would guess over 95% of cases \u2013 the accused person signs a full confession. Now you have to ask yourself why? And the reason is, the way the criminal justice system runs is the police decide who did it, then beat the hell out of them, suffocate them, dip bits of them into boiling liquid or whatever until they sign a confession. Then they\u2019re convicted. And the same applies in cases of political and religious dissidents. About a quarter of all so-called criminal cases in Uzbekistan are actually political or religious in their motivation. <\/p>\n

Q: A controversial accusation you made was that MI6 was using information extracted from tortured Uzbek citizens. What evidence did you actually have to lead you to this conclusion? <\/p>\n

CM: I\u2019ve got no doubts about it whatsoever. I\u2019m 100 percent sure of it, and in all my dealings with the British government about it \u2013 and I\u2019ve been called back from Uzbekistan to have meetings specifically on the subject \u2013 they have never denied it. The British government has never denied it, and scores of British reporters have phoned up the Foreign Office and said, \u201cWhat is the line?\u201d and they always come back with the same line. It\u2019s that \u201cit would be irresponsible to ignore useful evidence in the war against terror\u201d. They have never said, \u201cNo, we\u2019re not gaining evidence from torture,\u201d \u2013 the British government has never denied it. They can\u2019t deny it. <\/p>\n

Q: Taking things a stage further, there was a report a little while back about the American \u2018Ghost Planes\u2019 which would take people to countries where torture was used and get information from them. Do you know anything about this? <\/p>\n

CM: Well yes, that Gulfstream plane came in to Tashkent several times while I was there, and it\u2019d bring in detainees. As far as I\u2019m aware it only brought in Uzbek detainees from Bagram airport, from Afghanistan. I\u2019ve had many people allege to me that Americans used it to bring non-Uzbek-related detainees in specifically to be tortured for questioning. I never saw any evidence of that. I\u2019m not saying it isn\u2019t true, but to my knowledge I only know of it bringing in detainees from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. <\/p>\n

Q: Well, isn\u2019t it against the UN Convention Against Torture article 3.1 (No state party shall expel, return or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he will be in danger of being subjected to torture) whoever they were and wherever they were from? <\/p>\n

CM: Yes it is contrary to that, undoubtedly. <\/p>\n

Q: And did you bring this up with the American government? <\/p>\n

CM: Yes, I mean, I asked my deputy to speak to the head of the CIA station in Tashkent. And what I said was, \u201cI don\u2019t want to put my foot in it here. Now it\u2019s possible that the CIA have got a special arrangement with the Uzbek security services which makes certain that the intelligence they get wasn\u2019t obtained under torture, maybe they have special photographs, and CIA people posted at all interrogations, and arrangements are in place. I don\u2019t want to make a fool of myself. We need to check that this really is obtained under torture.\u201d So she went and saw the CIA head of station in Tashkent, and this was in November 2002, and said to him, \u201cLook, my ambassador\u2019s worried that the intelligence you\u2019re passing on to MI6 is probably obtained under torture, and he wants your take on whether this is possible\u201d. And she reported back to me, absolutely no reason to disbelieve her, the CIA head of station Tashkent said: \u201cYou\u2019re right, it will be obtained under torture. But, we don\u2019t see that as a problem.\u201d Yes, I\u2019ve got no doubt at all about it. <\/p>\n

Q: And I suppose they justify this by saying it\u2019s part of the War on Terror? <\/p>\n

CM: Yes, but the War on Terror seems to justify any ablations of human rights whatsoever. <\/p>\n

Q: Yes, I was quite interested to see Condoleeza Rice naming the \u2018outposts of tyranny\u2019, which obviously don\u2019t include Uzbekistan. They\u2019re Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma and Belarus. <\/p>\n

CM: I think it\u2019s fascinating that the Americans are much harder on human rights in Kazakhstan, which although bad, isn\u2019t nearly as bad as Uzbekistan. It\u2019s quite amazing really, and the Americans amaze me with their hypocrisy. <\/p>\n

Q: Is it something to do with the huge business possibilities in Kazakhstan? Are they trying to clean it up? <\/p>\n

CM: Yes, I think their attitude towards anywhere depends on what\u2019s best for the American oil and gas interests in effect. And I think that American oil and gas interests weren\u2019t doing as well as they\u2019d wanted in Kazakhstan so they then hit the country over the head with the human rights stick in an effort to loosen it up, with that motive. I think that\u2019s certainly true. Uzbekistan they want to keep sweet because their airbase is seen as central to their policy of military domination of the oil and gas regions. So that\u2019s why. But I think for Condoleeza Rice to name those countries, did she name Zimbabwe? <\/p>\n

Q: Yes, that was one of the ones. <\/p>\n

CM: Well, in Zimbabwe, for example, they\u2019ve got a very unpleasant government but it doesn\u2019t practice torture on anything like the scale that Karimov does, and there is an opposition. They\u2019ve just had democratic elections in Uzbekistan, so-called, and the opposition weren\u2019t allowed to contest them. I saw a most wonderful statement from the American ambassador, a load of pious rubbish, where he applauded the elections as a step on the road to democracy, and then at the end said it was unfortunate that the opposition weren\u2019t allowed to take part! But I mean, in Zimbabwe, at least the opposition can actually stand in elections and there are actually opposition members of parliament, there is an independent judiciary. There are none of those things in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is, by any measure, a much worse dictatorship than Zimbabwe, and Condoleeza Rice is just talking, well, crap. <\/p>\n

Q: On the subject of the Uzbek elections, obviously the OSCE were less than impressed with the way it was run, and one of Karimov\u2019s answers to this was that it didn\u2019t matter what the OSCE said anyway. To what extent is he right? I mean, how much weight does an OSCE report really have? <\/p>\n

CM: He\u2019s completely right, because the member governments don\u2019t have the political will to actually do anything about it. The OSCE has to face up, at some stage, to the question of, \u2018What does it do about including in its membership countries which fundamentally just don\u2019t believe in the basic tenets of the OSCE\u2019. It\u2019s a question that can\u2019t be ignored forever. And anyone who believes that democracy will come by pandering to Karimov gradually over a ten or twenty-year period is talking rubbish. There has been no progress whatsoever in the last five years, so why would anyone expect any to come now? <\/p>\n

Q: And where does the British government stand? <\/p>\n

A: I think when it comes to the War on Terror the British government doesn\u2019t have its own policy. It\u2019s simply following United States policy. It\u2019s policy is to stay in line with the United States, or as Tony Blair would put it, \u2018To stay shoulder to shoulder with the United States\u2019 \u2013 even when the United States is very obviously acting appallingly. <\/p>\n

Q: What are your plans for the future? <\/p>\n

A: My immediate plans\u2026I intend to stand against Jack Straw in his Blackburn constituency. Just to annoy him. And to bring home this question of complicity with dictatorships, complicity with torture in the War on Terror, because Jack Straw himself personally took the decision to use Uzbek torture-based intelligence. It was put to him, he discussed it. He discussed it with the head of MI6 and they decided they would continue using it. So I want to hold him accountable for that, and to make sure that the electors and his own constituency know all about it. I\u2019m not anticipating being elected I should hasten to say. You can be the first people to publish that! <\/p>\n

Q: You\u2019ve almost finished writing a book on your experiences over the last two years, but what else are you doing, or planning to do, at present? <\/p>\n

CM: I do a number of lectures, and I\u2019ve got a few more lined up The book is going to be the main thing. And there are a couple of major television documentaries coming out in the spring, on the torture issue. I\u2019ve already pre-recorded quite long interviews for those. I did an appearance on \u2018Hard Talk\u2019, so I\u2019m continuing to do quite a lot of media and broadcast work. It\u2019s not something I intend to let drop. <\/p>\n

Q: And in the long term would you like to return to Uzbekistan? <\/p>\n

CM: Oh yes, I love the country. I love the people, generally. I\u2019ve got lots of good friends there. I fully intend to go back once we\u2019ve got rid of the dictatorship. But that will be some time yet. I can\u2019t see any signs of hope on the horizon. The people get steadily poorer. It\u2019s pretty desperate there, this winter again, with salaries months behind, no heating at all, and cold weather. There\u2019s no sign of economic reform. And one thing I want to do is start a campaign against Uzbek cotton, because the ordinary people of Uzbekistan don\u2019t benefit at all from the cotton. They get pressed as slave labour to pick it. Children of seven and up have to pick cotton, living in pretty awful conditions in the fields. It\u2019s child slave labour that picks most of Uzbekistan\u2019s cotton, and I hope to start a campaign on that issue. Uzbek cotton is still 100% state grown. Workers on state farms, who make up 60% of the population, get $2 a month. So it seems to me that a campaign against Uzbek cotton is a good idea. The difficulty is that you can\u2019t do it by consumer boycott, because there\u2019s no way of telling where those fibers in your shirt came from! <\/p>\n

Unfortunately my voice recorder ran out at this stage, but I took detailed notes throughout the interview, which went on for another ten minutes or so. He spoke about his unexplained illness \u2013 heart problem \u2013 which almost killed him 48 hours after returning to Tashkent for the last time. To this day, he doesn\u2019t know if it was the result of a deliberate attempt on his life, but believes it probably was. Whatever the reason, it has left him with a serious heart condition for which he\u2019ll undergo major heart-surgery in March this year. <\/p>\n

He also spoke of a protest by around 100 Uzbek citizens outside the British Embassy in Tashkent \u2013 one of the largest ever protests under Karimov\u2019s regime – after he\u2019d been removed from Uzbekistan for raising too many issues the British government would rather not discuss. The peaceful demonstrators were \u2018dispersed\u2019 by the Uzbek police \u2013 who severely beat them (including the women and children). Craig Murray assumes that this was at the request of the British Embassy. If you\u2019d like any more detailed information on these extra areas, let me know and I\u2019ll send them through. <\/p>\n

To date, no accusations against Craig Murray of misconduct have been proved by the FCO. He remains indefinitely suspended on full pay.
\nhttps:\/\/www4.indymedia.org.uk\/en\/2005\/02\/304790.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For alleging that MI6 and the CIA are using confessions extracted by torture in the \u2018War on Terror\u2019, Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan has been suspended<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Unreported_News"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}