From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 1/8/2006 12:56 PM
News story for your website:
Craig Murray says UK lied on torture evidence
 
The British government has been accused of lying over its connivance at the use of torture by one of its own ambassadors.
 
Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, posted on his personal website on December 30 a series of documents that the British government sought to suppress and that appear to buttress his charges.
 
The documents also include a formal memo to his superiors at the Foreign Office in which Murray states the reason why the British continued to accept intelligence from Uzbekistan that had been acquired as a result of torturing detainees.
 
Murray decided to publish the material on his website because the Foreign Office was withholding permission to cite them in a book he has written.
 
In one of the confidential reports dated September 16, 2002, and marked ‘Confidential’, it says: "Between 7,000 and 10,000 political and religious prisoners are currently detained, many after trials before kangaroo courts with no representation. Terrible torture is commonplace: the EU is currently considering a demarche over the terrible case of two Muslims tortured to death in jail apparently with boiling water."
 
Murray’s decision to publish in a confidential report to London, dated 18 March 2003, Murray wrote: "As seen from Tashkent, US policy is not much focused on democracy or freedom. It is about oil, gas and hegemony. In Uzbekistan, the United States pursues those ends through supporting a ruthless dictatorship. We must not close our eyes to uncomfortable truth."
 
"Last year the United States gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail [President Islam] Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least 7,000 prisoners of conscience; it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom."
 
Murray goes on: "When the US gives this much support to a regime that tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day, is it any surprise that Muslims come to hate the West?"
 
"I was stunned to hear that the US had pressured the EU to withdraw a motion on Human Rights in Uzbekistan which the EU was tabling at the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva," Murray adds. "I was most unhappy to find that we are helping the US in what I can only call this cover-up."
 
After Murray was ordered home in October 2004, he went public, telling the media that he was a "victim of conscience". He also stood for parliament against Foreign Secretary Straw in April, receiving just 5 percent of the vote, but embarrassing Straw before the Foreign Secretary’s many Muslim constituents.
 
The Muslim weekly
2006-01-06 19:54:24
http://www.kavkazcenter.net/eng/content/2006/01/06/4353.shtml