How a Torture Protest Killed a Career
by Craig Murray

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/102409b.html

Editor's Note: In this modern age - and
especially since George W. Bush declared the "war
on terror" eight years ago - the price for
truth-telling has been high, especially for
individuals whose consciences led them to protest
the torture of alleged terrorists.

One of the most remarkable cases is that of Craig
Murray, a 20-year veteran of the British Foreign
Service whose career was destroyed after he was
posted to Uzbekistan in August 2002 and began to
complain about Western complicity in torture
committed by the country's totalitarian regime,
which was valued for its brutal interrogation
methods and its vast supplies of natural gas.

Murray soon faced misconduct charges that were
leaked to London's tabloid press before he was
replaced as ambassador in October 2004, marking
the end of what had been a promising career.
Murray later spoke publicly about how the Bush
administration and Prime Minister Tony Blair's
government collaborated with Uzbek dictator Islam
Karimov and his torturers. [See, for instance,
Murray's statement to the Parliamentary Joint
Committee on Torture.]

But Murray kept quiet about his personal ordeal
as the victim of the smear campaign that followed
his impassioned protests to the Foreign Office
about torture. Finally, on Oct. 22 at a small
conference in Washington, Murray addressed the
personal pain and his sense of betrayal over his
treatment at the hands of former colleagues.

While Murray's account is a personal one, it
echoes the experiences of many honest government
officials and even mainstream journalists who
have revealed inconvenient truths about
wrongdoing by powerful Establishment figures and
paid a high price.

Below is a partial transcript of Murray's remarks:

I was just having dinner in a restaurant that was
only a block from the White House. It must have
been a good dinner because it cost me $120.
Actually it was a good dinner. Š

I've never, ever spoken in public about the pain
of being a whistleblower. Partly because of the
British stiff-upper lip thing and partly as well
because if you wish to try eventually to get on
and reestablish yourself then it doesn't do to
show weakness. Š

I was sitting in this place on my own and feeling
rather lonely. And there were a whole bunch of
people in dark suits coming from government
offices, in many cases in groups, and there they
were with the men's suits sleek and the ladies,
the whole office, power-politics thing going on,
having after-dinner champagne in the posh bar.

And I was remembering how many times I'd been the
center of such groups and of how successful my
life used to be. I was a British ambassador at
the age of 42. The average age for such a post is
57.

I was successful in worldly terms. And I think I
almost never sat alone at such a place. Normally
if I had been alone in such a place, I would have
ended up probably in the company of a beautiful
young lady of some kind.

I tell you that partly because this whole
question of personal morality is a complicated
one. I would never, ever, no one would have ever
pointed at me as someone likely to become or to
be a person of conscience. And yet eventually I
found myself on the outside and treated in a way
that challenged my whole view of the world.

Mission to Tashkent

Let me start to tell you something about how that
happened. I was a British ambassador in
Uzbekistan and I was told before I went that
Uzbekistan was an important ally in the war on
terror, had given the United States a very
important airbase which was a forward mounting
post for Afghanistan, and was a bulwark against
Islamic extremism in Central Asia.

When I got there I found it was a dreadful
regime, absolutely totalitarian. And there's a
difference between dictatorship of which there
are many and a totalitarian dictatorship which
unless you've actually been in one is hard to
comprehend.

There's absolutely no free media whatsoever. News
on every single channel, the news programs start
with 12 items about what the president did today.
And that's it. That is the news. There are no
other news channels and international news
channels are blocked.

There are about 12,000 political prisoners. Any
sign of religious enthusiasm for any religion
will get you put into jail. The majority of
people are predominantly Muslim. But if you are
to carry out the rituals of the Muslim religion,
particularly if you were to pray five times a
day, you'd be in jail very quickly. Young men are
put in jail for growing beards.

It's not the only religion which is outlawed. The
jails are actually quite full of Baptists.  Being
Baptist is illegal in Uzbekistan. I'm sure that
Methodists and Quakers would be illegal, too,
It's just that they haven't got any so they
haven't gotten around to making them illegal.

And it's really not a joke. If you are put into
prison in Uzbekistan the chances of coming out
again alive are less than even. And most of the
prisons are still the old Soviet gulags in the
most literal sense. They are physically the same
places. The biggest one being the Jaslyk gulag in
the deserts of the Kizyl Kum.

I had only been there for a week or two when I
went to a show trial of an al-Qaeda terrorist
they had caught. It was a big event put on partly
for the benefit of the American embassy to
demonstrate the strength of the U.S.-Uzbek
alliance against terrorism.

When I got there, to call the trial unconvincing
would be an underestimate. There was one moment
when this old man [who] had given evidence that
his nephew was a member of al-Qaeda and had
personally met Osama bin Laden. And like
everybody else in that court he
was absolutely terrified.

But suddenly as he was giving his evidence, he
seemed from somewhere to find an inner strength.
He was a very old man but he stood taller and
said in a stronger voice, he said, "This is not
true. This is not true. They tortured my children
in front of me until I signed this. I had never
heard of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden."

He was then hustled out of the court and we never
did find out what had happened to him. He was
almost certainly killed. But as it happens I was
within touching distance of him when he said that
and I can't explain it. It's not entirely
rational. But you could just feel it was true.
You could tell he was speaking the truth when he
said that.

And that made me start to call into doubt the
whole question of the narrative about al-Qaeda in
Uzbekistan and the alliance in the war on terror.

Boiled to Death

Something which took that doubt over the top
happened about a week later. The West -- because
Uzbekistan was our great ally in the war on
terror - had shown no interest in the human
rights situation at all. In fact, the opposite,
going out of its way to support the
dictatorship.

So the fact that I seemed to be interested and
seemed to be sympathetic came as something of a
shock and people [in Uzbekistan] started to come
to me.

One of the people who came to me was an old lady,
a widow in her 60s whose son had been killed in
Jaslyk prison and she brought me photos of the
corpse of her son. It had been given back to her
in a sealed casket and she'd been ordered not to
open the casket but to bury it the next morning,
which actually Muslims would do anyway. They
always bury a body immediately.

But she disobeyed the instructions not to open
the casket. She was a very old lady but very
determined. She got the casket open and the body
out onto the table and took detailed photos of
the body before resealing the casket and burying
it. These photos she now brought to me.

I sent them on to the chief pathologist at the
University of Glasgow, who actually now by
coincidence is the chief pathologist for the
United Kingdom. There were a number of photos and
he did a detailed report on the body. He said
from the photographs the man's fingernails had
been pulled out while he was still alive. Then he
had been boiled alive. That was the cause of
death, immersion in boiling liquid.

Certainly it wasn't the only occasion when we
came across evidence of people being boiled
alive. That was the most extreme form of torture,
I suppose, but immersion in boiling liquid of a
limb was quite common.

Mutilation of the genitals was common.
Suffocation was common, usually by putting a gas
mask on people and blocking the air vents until
they suffocated. Rape was common, rape with
objects, rape with bottles, anal rape, homosexual
rape, heterosexual rape, and mutilation of
children in front of their parents.

It began with that and became a kind of personal
mission for me, I suppose, to do what I could to
try to stop this. I spent a great deal of time
with my staff gathering evidence on it.

Being a very capricious government, occasionally
a victim [of the Uzbek regime] would be released
and we'd be able to see them and get medical
evidence. More often you'd get letters smuggled
out of the gulags and detention centers, evidence
from relatives who managed to
visit prisoners.

We built up an overwhelming dossier of evidence,
and I complained to London about the conduct of
our ally in rather strong terms including the
photos of the boy being boiled alive.
'Over-Focused on Human Rights'

I received a reply from the British Foreign
Office. It said, this is a direct quote, "Dear
Ambassador, we are concerned that you are perhaps
over-focused on human rights to the detriment of
commercial interests."

I was taken aback. I found that extraordinary.
But things had gotten much worse because while we
were gathering the information about torture, we
were also learning what people were forced to
confess to under torture.

People aren't tortured for no reason. They're
tortured in order to extract some information or
to get them to admit to things, and normally the
reason you torture people is to get them to admit
to things that aren't actually true. They were
having to confess to membership in al-Qaeda, to
being at training camps in Afghanistan,
personally meeting Osama bin Laden.

At the same time, we were receiving CIA
intelligence. MI-6 and the CIA share all their
intelligence. So I was getting all the CIA
intelligence on Uzbekistan and it was saying that
detainees had confessed to membership in al-Qaeda
and being in training camps in Afghanistan and to
meeting Osama bin Laden.

One way and another I was piecing together the
fact that the CIA material came from the Uzbek
torture sessions.

I didn't want to make a fool of myself so I sent
my deputy, a lady called Karen Moran, to see the
CIA head of station and say to him, "My
ambassador is worried your intelligence might be
coming from torture. Is there anything he's
missing?"

She reported back to me that the CIA head of
station said, "Yes, it probably is coming from
torture, but we don't see that as a problem in
the context of the war on terror."

In addition to which I learned that CIA were
actually flying people to Uzbekistan in order to
be tortured. I should be quite clear that I knew
for certain and reported back to London that
people were being handed over by the CIA to the
Uzbek intelligence services and were being
subjected to the most horrible tortures.

I didn't realize that they weren't Uzbek. I
presumed simply that these were Uzbek people who
had been captured elsewhere and were being sent
in.

I now know from things I've learned subsequently,
including the facts that the Council of Europe
parliamentary inquiry into extraordinary
rendition found that 90 percent of all the
flights that called at the secret prison in
Poland run by the CIA as a torture center for
extraordinary rendition, 90 percent of those
flights next went straight on to Tashkent [the
capital of Uzbekistan].

There was an overwhelming body of evidence that
actually people from all over the world were
being taken by the CIA to Uzbekistan specifically
in order to be tortured. I didn't know that. I
thought it was only Uzbeks, but nonetheless, I
was complaining internally as hard as I could.
Retaliation

The result of which was that even when I was only
complaining internally, I was subjected to the
most dreadful pattern of things which I still
find it hard to believe happened.

I was suddenly accused of issuing visas in return
for sex, stealing money from the post account, of
being an alcoholic, of driving an embassy vehicle
down a flight of stairs, which is extraordinary
because I can't drive. I've never driven in my
life. I don't have a driving license. My eyesight
is terrible. Š

But I was accused of all these unbelievable
accusations, which were leaked to the tabloid
media, and I spent a whole year of tabloid
stories about sex-mad ambassador, blah-blah-blah.
And I hadn't even gone public. What I had done
was write a couple of memos saying that this
collusion with torture is illegal under a number
of international conventions including the UN
Convention Against Torture.

I couldn't believe [what was happening], I'd been
a very successful foreign service officer for
over 20 years. The British Foreign Service is
small. Actual diplomats, as opposed to [support]
staff, are only about 2,000 people,

I worked there for over 20 years. I knew most of
them by name. All the people involved in smearing
me, trying to taint me on false charges, were
people I thought were my friends. It's really
hard when people you think are your friends [lie
about you].

I'm writing memos saying it's illegal to torture
people, children are being tortured in front of
their parents. And they're writing memos back
saying it depends on the definition of complicity
under Article Four of the UN Convention.

I'm thinking what's happening to their moral
sense, and I never, ever considered myself a good
person, at all. Yet I couldn't see where they
were coming from and I still don't; I still don't
understand it to this day.

And then these people - and I'm absolutely
certain quite knowingly - tried to negate what
they saw as these unpatriotic things. I was told
I was viewed now as unpatriotic, by trying to
land me with false allegations.

I went through a five-month fight and formal
charges. I was found eventually not guilty on all
charges, but my reputation was ruined forever
because the tabloid media all carried the
allegations against me in 25-point headlines and
the fact I was acquitted in two sentences on page
19. It's extraordinary.

Lessons Learned

The thing that came out of it most strongly for
me is how in a bureaucratic structure, if the
government can convince people that there is a
serious threat to the nation, ordinary people who
are not bad people will go along with things that
they know are bad, like torture, like trying to
stain an innocent man.

And it's circular, because the extraordinary
thing about it was that the whole point of the
intelligence being obtained under torture was to
actually exaggerate the terrorist threats and to
exaggerate the strength of al-Qaeda.

That was the whole point of why people were being
tortured, to confess that they were members of
al-Qaeda when they weren't members of al-Qaeda
and to denounce long lists of names of people as
members of al-Qaeda who weren't members of
al-Qaeda.

I always tell my favorite example which is they
gave me a long list of names of people whom
people were forced to denounce and I often saw
names of people I knew.

One day, I got this list from the CIA of names of
a couple dozen al-Qaeda members and I knew one
really quite well, an old dissident professor, a
very distinguished man who was actually a
Jehovah's Witness, and there aren't many
Jehovah's Witnesses in al-Qaeda. I'd even bet
that al-Qaeda don't even try to recruit Jehovah's
Witnesses. I'm quite sure that Jehovah's
Witnesses would try to recruit al-Qaeda.

So much of this intelligence was nonsense. It was
untrue and it was designed to paint a false
picture. The purpose of the false picture was to
make people feel afraid. What was it really
about. Š

I want to mention this book, which is the
greatest book that I've ever written. It's called
Murder in Samarkand and recounts in detail what I
have just told you together with the documentary
evidence behind it.

But the most interesting bit of the entire book
comes before the page numbers start, which is a
facsimile of a letter from Enron, from Kenneth
Lay, chairman of Enron, to the honorable George
W. Bush, governor of the state of Texas. It was
written on April 3, 1997, sometime before Bush
became president.

It reads, I'll just read you two or three
sentences, "Dear George, you will be meeting with
Ambassador Sadyq Safaev, Uzbekistan's Ambassador
to the United States on April 8th. Š Enron has
established an office in Tashkent and we are
negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with
Neftegas of Uzbekistan Š to develop Uzbekistan's
natural gas and transport it to markets in Europe
Š This project can bring significant economic
opportunities to Texas."

Not everyone in Texas, of course. George Bush and Ken Lay, in particular.

That's actually what it was about. All this stuff
about al-Qaeda that they were inventing, extreme
Islamists in Central Asia that they were
inventing.

I have hundreds and hundreds of Uzbek friends
now. Every single one of them drinks vodka. It is
not a good place for al-Qaeda. They were
inventing the threat in order to cover up the
fact that their real motive was Enron's gas
contract and that was the plain and honest truth
of the matter.

Just as almost everything you see about
Afghanistan is a cover for the fact that the
actual motive is the pipeline they wish to build
over Afghanistan to bring out Uzbek and Turkmen
natural gas which together is valued at up to $10
trillion, which they want to bring over
Afghanistan and down to the Arabian Sea to make
it available for export.

And we are living in a world where people, a
small number of people, with incredible political
clout and huge amounts of money, are prepared to
see millions die for their personal economic gain
and where, even worse, most people in
bureaucracies are prepared to go along with it
for their own much smaller economic gain, all
within this psychological mirage which is so much
of the war on terror.

It's hard to stand against it. I do think things
are a little more sane now than they were a year
or two ago. I do think there's a greater
understanding, but you'll never hear what I just
told you in the mainstream media. It's impossible
to get it there.

[For an early Consortiumnews.com article about
President Bush's Uzbek alliance, see "The More
Things Change."]