The Observer – British liberty is under threat (leader)

Terrorism directed at innocent civilians is an affront against every norm of every society. Certainly, we need laws that deal determinedly with terrorist networks and can track down and imprison terrorists, and British law rightly gives our security and intelligence services powerful instruments with which to discharge this vital responsibility. They can arrest and question suspects on the basis of intelligence information. They can put their networks under surveillance, tap phones, and examine every detail of the lives of suspected terrorists and their contacts. Suspects can be detained for up to 14 days and, once evidence has been secured, they can be brought before a court to secure further detention under a wide array of potential charges.

Where to strike the balance between the need for a tough framework to protect citizens from terrorist attack and the need to respect individual justice has always been hotly contested territory. But an inviolable principle has always been that no British citizen should be denied liberty without the promise of the evidence against him or her ultimately being tested in court.

In one of the toughest ever anti-terrorist measures taken in Britain, the former Home Secretary held foreign terrorist suspects in Belmarsh without trial or knowledge of the evidence against them. He was rightly condemned by the Law Lords. Tomorrow, the government will try to wriggle free from this hook. David Blunkett’s successor, Charles Clarke, will attempt to reframe the law with ‘control orders’ and give himself the power to order the indefinite house arrest of any British citizen suspected of terrorism on the advice of the intelligence services. There will be no need for the evidence ever to subjected to the scrutiny of a trial.

Mr Clarke inherited an incredible mess from his predecessor, who seemed never to comprehend that the rule of law was an indispensable component of a free society. Those who cared about such questions were condemned. But Mr Clarke’s initial compromise – to release the detainees but subject them to de-facto house arrest – in no way improved the situation.

Even worse is the Prime Minister’s argument that there is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack. It is comic in its misrepresentation of the issues. Labour election strategists concerned about disillusion in Labour’s base should look no further than such asinine and debasing justifications. Yes, the right not to be killed is fundamental, but so is the right not to be deprived of one’s freedom on evidence that will never be subject to the independent scrutiny of a court.

The Prime Minister’s attempt at clever paradox traduces generations of Western politicians, philosophers and lawyers who have strived for political rule that maintains liberty and security.

The new compromise – that the government will undertake to have its decision validated by a judge at an early stage in the process – does not allay our fears. Judges can make mistakes and, like politicians, have only the untested evidence provided by the intelligence services to go on. This, we know all too well, is variable in quality. Indeed, it says much for the corruption of our political culture that the brave parliamentary critics of control orders consider settling for so little to give their consent to a deeply flawed and illiberal bill.

What is now needed, following the judgment of the Law Lords, is adoption of the principle that any form of detention must be followed by the requirement of a trial. Monday’s vote is crucial – for civil liberties and for the rule of law. Labour is on the wrong side of this argument and has to be opposed.

Sunday Herald – UK Ex-ambassador slams Straw over torture (by Alan Crawford, Special Correspondent)

FOREIGN Secretary Jack Straw has abandoned all pretence of an ethical foreign policy, and the government’s condemnation of torture “doesn’t mean anything”, a former British ambassador has told the Sunday Herald.

Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan who last week announced he would stand against Jack Straw in the general election, was speaking after receiving ?315,000 in red undancy pay from the Foreign and Commonwealth Off ice. He insists the pay-off means he has been exonerated of misbehaviour in speaking out about human rights abuses in the former Soviet republic and accusing the UK government of using intelligence obtained by torture.

“The UN has said torture is widespread and systematic in Uzbekistan. But the Uzbeks know fine that their security services are passing on to the CIA and MI6 the results of the torture, and they’re lapping them up,” Murray said.

“So even though the Foreign Office will tell you, ‘Oh, we have condemned torture in Uzbekistan’, it doesn’t mean anything, because by accepting the intelligence you are tipping them the wink to carry on.”

He added: “I think Jack Straw has chucked any notion of an ethical foreign policy completely out of the window.”

Murray, 46, a Scot and graduate of Dundee University, also criticised the Home Office decision to place suspects under house arrest without trial on the basis of intelligence reports, saying that the reliability of evidence obtained under torture was “questionable”.

“One thing that’s so horrible about this whole thing is that this kind of evidence obtained under torture is the kind of material that’s being used to keep these poor people locked up for three years without trial and without charge on the basis on intelligence reports,” he said.

“What they don’t tell you is that that was probably some poor bugger in prison in Egypt with electrodes on his testicles, screaming in agony, who named a name to try and stop the torture.”

Murray has been a controversial figure since late 2002, when, just a few months after taking up his posting, he publicised his fears that “brutality” was rife in Uzbek jails and highlighted a case where two men had been boiled to death.

In March 2003 he was summoned to the Foreign Office, where, he says, he was told that “yes, [intelligence] may be obtained under torture, but provided we didn’t specifically ask for the individual to be tortured or do the torturing ourselves, that’s not illegal. And that Jack Straw had personally considered the matter and the security services decided this was useful material, so we should keep getting it and I should shut up.”

He did not, and later faced a disciplinary hearing on unrelated allegations of financial corruption, being drunk on duty and having sex with Uzbek women in return for UK visas. He was subsequently exonerated, but not before he suffered a nervous breakdown .

The only explanation for the allegations, he claims, was that the Foreign Office “simply invented them to scare me into resigning”.

Murray, who is to speak to students at Dundee University tomorrow, is to contest the Foreign Secretary’s Blackburn seat at the general election .

“I’ll be standing as an independent under the slogan ‘No to George Bush’,” he said. “If people want to send a strong message of disquiet about the government’s foreign policy, there’s no better way to do that than to unseat Jack Straw.”

Murray is hard on Straw, but harder still on the US. He accuses the US campaign to spread democracy worldwide of “total hypocrisy” in supporting client states which practise torture, such as Uzbekistan .

Islam Karimov, the Uzbek president, was largely ignored by the West until after 9/11, since when he has been supported by Washington.

” The Uzbek regime is very substantially propped up by the Americans,” Murray said. “It receives hundreds of millions of dollars a year in American aid, including military aid and aid to its security services. It has several thousand US troops in the country. ”

Murray said the US risked creating a fundamentalist Isla mic state by supporting Karimov. “People don’t see any means of opposition except for the underground Islamic movement. I think by our stupid support for the dictatorship we are going to create a radical Islamic movement where there wasn’t much of one before,” he said.

“Iran under the Shah is a good example, where the West was backing the Shah despite the fact he was ultra-unpopular, and an Islamic movement grew up which was terribly anti-Western. I fear the same will happen in Uzbekistan . ”

Sobaka’s Notebook

by Cali Ruchala

It began ordinarily enough for what’s being billed a merchant’s revolt: a dispute about taxes, about trade, about “contraband.” Only, in Uzbekistan, “contraband” is broadly defined as any product which might sustain a citizen’s life, when the citizen is not related to Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov.

Over the last three years, since I was last in the country, the Uzbek authorities have been receding back to their Bolshevik roots. Ordinary trade – the buying or selling or trading of milk, or clothing, or foodstuffs on a person-to-person basis – has been all but outlawed, with just enough negligence to ensure that their millions of rather wretched citizens somehow find a way to get by. Bazaars were closed in November 2002 to weed out “corruption.” It did no such thing but it ensured that these potential dens of espionage and anti-Karimov activity were suitably smaller and easier to monitor when they were re-opened.

Payments once made in cash are now forced through the state-controlled banking sector. Since the government oversees the flow of money, it often arbitrarily obstructs or delays ordinary transactions as a crude way to fight inflation. It’s not helping. Since August, anecdotal evidence has it (since the official predictions always promise sunshine), prices have gone up by as much as 25% across the board.

In Kokand, they finally had enough. If it had happened in 1984 rather than 2004, the US embassy in Moscow might have released a circular sternly drawing attention to the misery of the Uzbek people under Communism. But since Uzbeks now blanch under our kind of totalitarianism, hardly a word was uttered by our sentinels of freedom and other Yale graduates about the November 1st riots which began in the troublesome Ferghana Valley and soon spread in a wave of looting and hurled stones across the country.

Those stones, to a romantic, might be said to be the first blows that will knock the arrogantly evil Islam Karimov r?gime off its pedestal. Thanks to the almost insane policies of the Americans for the last decade, however, what replaces it will almost certainly be as awful.

Throughout the 1990s, the Americans had very little to do with Uzbekistan. Central Asia was, as the policy wonks and professional freedomologists told us, “in transition”. This was a good enough alibi to shell a parliament with tanks, as Boris Yeltsin did. And so it provided enough political cover for Islam Karimov to outlaw the peaceful opposition and drag his dissidents through the jails or across the borders of the country. The “old opposition,” as they’re even now being called today, is mostly based in Europe now, as none of the countries bordering Uzbekistan feel quite secure enough to harbour their neighbour’s enemies.

Since then, we’ve seen a never-ending comedy of fixed elections, referenda extending the president’s term, and other initiatives invariably supported by an overwhelming majority. The government of Uzbekistan controls the four legal opposition parties, and the head of the Central Election Commission feels smug enough to state that “there is no opposition in Uzbekistan,” and that “the elections will be democratic, irrespective of the opposition’s participation.” The essential contradiction between his two statements notwithstanding, these can be taken as essential truths in Uzbekistan. For like George Orwell’s Oceania, when the government of Uzbekistan says things are true, it makes them true.

AMERICA: PARTNER IN TORTURE?

The methods by which lies are made true in this proud ally in the War on Terror, this essential cog in the Machine of the Willing, might seem gratuitous, but a lurid description is necessary.

The body of one dissident, Muzafar Avazov, was photographed after he had died in government custody at Jaslyk prison. The Department of Pathology at the University of Glasgow, studying photographs of his body, determined that he had been boiled to death. He had been immersed in a vat of some kind of boiling liquid, and not merely scalded. The pattern of his burns revealed a tidemark scalded onto his body, with heinous burns below.

One could go on, but reputable organizations have entire folios filled with accounts such as this (check out the one about Fatima Mukadirova – Avazov’s mother – who was imprisoned after her son’s story became public). Karimov has declared war against his own impoverished people. That’s bad enough in and of itself, but it’s shocking that the United States is reaping the “benefits” of this closeted murder of an entire nation.

Article IV of the UN Convention Against Torture obliges all signatories to pursue criminal charges against torturers. Uzbekistan is certainly in violation of this, since torture is undeniably a state strategy to keep Karimov and his clan on top. The question is, how much of this information garnered by torture is being passed on to the West, and how seriously are we taking it?

According to rogue British Ambassador Craig Murray, who has been repeatedly lambasted by the Karimov regime for his frank assessments, the information is “useless.” Nevertheless, according to a memo of his which was leaked to the press (in the West: there’s of course no free press in Uzbekistan to speak of), “Tortured dupes are forced to sign confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe – that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.

“This is morally, legally and practically wrong. We are selling our souls for dross.”

For memos and speeches such as this, in October 2004, Murray was suspended from his post. The Uzbek government had presented a list of some 18 accusations against the British ambassador, from seducing virtuous Uzbek visa-seekers to driving his Land Rover down a flight of stairs. It’s a pathetic joke, but what is alarming is that the US or UK would take anything Karimov’s toadies say seriously.

Try as they might, they can’t muddy the issue. According to Murray’s memo, these “confessions” were passed on to Britain’s MI6 by way of the CIA. The Agency had them because they’ve developed a sickeningly cozy relationship with Karimov’s apparatus of repression – just as they had with the Shah of Iran’s SAVAK.

It hardly matters if they’re in the same room, holding down the poor wretch while Karimov’s men work him over, or if they hold the rope that lowers him into the vat of boiling liquid (metaphorically speaking, you understand). If the boys from Langley are walking away all smiles with the product of this industrious labour, we’re not just partners in the terror of this despotic khan, but we’re actually treating confessions made under torture as serious intelligence. The ramifications are tremendous – the naivete, appalling.

And, anyway, as they told us after the horrors of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal were revealed, we’re against this sort of thing, right? I mean, Bush looked in the camera’s red eye and told us he does not condone torture.

So why – according to our chief ally’s ambassador – are we eagerly reading through confessions of no doubt farcical al-Qaeda plots which have been obtained by boiling people alive?

THINGS FALL APART

Uzbekistan’s Islamic threat, of course, is now real. Like his lies, Karimov has made them real. His government’s persecution of ordinary Muslims, the “old opposition” and whatever chutes rise out of the mud of his police state has forced dissent underground – down where the real Islamic nasties live. Islamic fundamentalism, which was almost unknown to the vast majority of Uzbeks until a few years ago, is being looked at as a real alternative – a better one, at least, than what Muzafar Avazov had to suffer.

The Karimov r?gime is fond of manipulating the United States by claiming that the Islamic movement in its country is in bed with al-Qaeda. If you listen carefully, however, you’ll also hear them say the same about the “old opposition,” the shattered Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (now stripped down to less than two hundred stragglers marooned in Western Pakistan), and the unknown, mysterious elements responsible for bombings in March and July 2004. Exaggerating the threat, inflating its importance, and conflating it with al-Qaeda has been Karimov’s stock in trade – no less important than his forgery of economic data and restrictions on any form of free enterprise – for security in his increasingly radicalized country. But now the threat is real and, thanks to Karimov, growing by leaps and bounds.

And if we can read any significance in the bombing of the Israeli and American embassies in July, they hate us just as much for what we’ve done to prop up their true adversary.

Meanwhile, Uzbekistan – and not Belarus, which is now America’s favourite post-Soviet whipping boy – is a grotesquerie of economic reform. Collective farms still function – the managers have merely given short-term leases to their tenants, who occupy the social and economic space of sharecroppers in the old American south. Vast sectors of the economy remain in government hands, and what’s been privatized has actually been “privatized” – placed in the trusty but incompetent hands of members of Karimov’s political clan. There is, in fact, not one area in which Uzbekistan has honestly moved forward since independence. This is pretty clear: yet the discontents within Uzbekistan are finding their only receptive audience in the underground.

On December 26th, Uzbeks will be rounded up to vote again, and the official tallies will once again fall completely out of whack with reality. The United States dreads these blasphemies of liberty almost as much as Karimov does. For a few days, they’ll have to issue statements of “concern” about the way Erk, Birlik, and the other parties of the “old opposition” were prevented from participating, about flagrant irregularities, and so on. You can almost hear the testiness in the State Department spokesman’s voice as he assures a few bored reporters that the Department will take this all into consideration when they dole out this year’s aid bonanza – a fantastic hunk of change by regional standards which is being cannibalized at a ferocious pace into Karimov’s private bank accounts.

And anyone who might be impetuous enough (or unpatriotic enough) to remind the sentinels of freedom of these matters later will suffer the fate of Craig Murray.

Uzbeks, unfortunately, already voted – with stones. If they wish to carry it any further, or somehow survive the repression which will inevitably follow, they’ll have to go underground, where others rule.

The Guardian – UK allies among worst abusers of human rights (by Richard Norton-Taylor)

Buyers of British arms and Britain’s close allies in the “war on terror” are named as being among the worst abusers of human rights in a government report published yesterday.

States identified include Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The US and Russia are also mentioned.

The 310-page annual human rights report published yesterday by the Foreign Office praises the role of Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Tashkent, in speaking out about human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, although Mr Murray has been suspended on full pay and faces a disciplinary hearing for gross misconduct.

The report praised Mr Murray for publicising the case of Fatima Mukadirova, whose son was tortured to death with boiling water in 2002. “We believe this played a significant role in bringing the case to the attention of the international community,” the FO report says.

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said yesterday he could not comment on the case.

The report was due to have been released on September 16, but was postponed after the Beslan school massacre in Russia. Mr Straw said yesterday that he delayed the publication “in order to reflect the horror of that attack and the wider implications of terrorist attacks”.

The report now emphasises the threat from terrorists. Mr Straw said that the casualties in Iraq since the end of April last year were the “direct responsibility” of terrorists as well as insurgents.

Yesterday’s report refers to “serious human rights violations”, including torture, by Russian officials in Chechnya. But it also says that “the UK recognises the genuine security problems faced by the Russian government in Chechnya and the north Caucasus”. It refers, too, to “abductions, torture, mine-laying, assassinations and looting carried out by Chechen militants”.

The report says there has been no significant improvement in human rights in Saudi Arabia, where it estimates that the authorities executed 52 people last year. Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest markets for British arms.

The report describes the abuse of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad as “shameful”. It also reiterates the government’s position that the remaining four British detainees at Guant?namo Bay should be returned to Britain. But it questions statements by the five others who have returned that they were abused there.

Amnesty International yesterday contrasted the report’s strong words condemning torture with what it called the “creeping acceptance” of the practice by the UK.

The government’s failure to fully incorporate the UN convention against torture into British law had left the door open for the authorities to rely on evidence obtained through torture by foreign agents, said Amnesty.

The thinktank Saferworld said it appeared that the government was failing to apply its own stated human rights criteria when licensing arms exports. It pointed to recent signficant arms sales to Indonesia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Nepal, all criticised in yesterday’s report.

“The report highlights the disparity between the government’s human rights and arms export policy,” said Paul Eavis, director of Saferworld. “The government risks undermining other important human rights work it is has achieved in the international arena unless changes to export controls are made.”

Mr Straw said yesterday that the government kept to EU and national guidelines and its arms export control policy was one of the most transparent and effective in the world.

Key points

?”Torture is abhorrent and illegal and the UK is opposed to [its] use under all circumstances”

?Abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq is “shameful”

?”There has been no significant improvement in human rights in Saudi Arabia”

?Abuses by law enforcement officials in Russia include torture and racism. Militants in Chechnya carry out torture, abductions, mine-laying and assassinations

? Israel’s policy of targeted assassination is illegal. The Palestinian Authority does not act to stop terrorism with sufficient energy

?Significant problems remain with security forces in Indonesia over the abuse of human rights

The Observer – There is no case for torture – ever (by Nick Cohen)

The troubles of Craig Murray, the sacked British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, appear at first glance to be a shocking exception to the rules of public life. When was the last time you heard of a case of a diplomat accused of drunken orgies and sexual blackmail after he had discomforted his masters in Whitehall? You don’t have to be Michael Moore to wonder if the Foreign Office needed to revert to the unparalleled tactic of tipping wheelbarrow loads of dirt over Murray to bury his bad news that Britain was in the market for information extracted by torturers.

Murray’s allegation is shocking because, say what you like about England, it has shunned torture for centuries. If you look a bit closer, however, you find that torture is no longer as exceptional as it once was. With many a sigh and expression of regret the Government is reaching an arrangement with torturers, and not only in Uzbekistan. English judges have accepted that confessions beaten out of suspects can be used for the first time since the 1630s. The only reaction, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, could manage to their extraordinary decision was the Peck sniffian bleat that he had the ‘awful feeling’ that learning to live with torture ‘is probably the right conclusion.’ As with so many other descents into barbarism, the judges and ministers make each step on the downward path appear eminently reasonable.

However strenuously the wishful thinkers of Western liberalism deny there is much to worry about, Islamism remains a psychopathic and totalitarian creed which sanctions the indiscriminate murder of countless victims. Reasonable governments know that the battle must be joined and that they must work to prevent crimes beyond the imagination of the world before 11 September.

But how should the security services react? Take the example of Murray’s Uzbekistan. It is caught in the same vice as many Muslim countries. On one side is a repressive government. On the other is an opposition some of whose members are turning to Islamism. You might have thought MI6 would be watching. Right and left fantasise about the spies’ reach and power: they either uncover deadly subversives or target every ‘freedom’ movement according to political taste. Both parties are united by the assumption that the security services have a competence bordering on the omniscient. What else is the near-universally believed charge that Blair lied about Iraq based on but the delusory notion that John Scarlett of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Sir Richard Dearlove of MI6 knew that Saddam had disarmed and were silenced?

In fact MI6 doesn’t have one spy in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or any of the other dangerous central Asian republics. It’s a small organisation which employs about 2000 people, many of them support staff. Even if it did have the resources to put men in Tashkent, what could they do? Roam Uzbekistan breaking into houses and interrogating suspects? In the circumstances it seems a reasonable step for the Foreign Office to take information from the oppressive governments of central Asia and the Middle East, even if there is a danger that it has been extracted by torturers. And it would be reasonable if, say, a plot by Uzbek exiles in London was treated simply as a tip-off which led to searches, surveillance and all the other normal means for collecting evidence which would stand up in a British court. If torture was involved, it would be somewhere far back down the line in a foreign country of which we knew little. The integrity of the case brought against the suspects in Britain wouldn’t be threatened.

What is now threatening the integrity of the criminal justice system is the internment of foreign terrorist suspects without trial or knowledge of the charges against them. Their claim that their detention is illegal was rejected by the Court of Appeal in August and is cur rently being considered by the Law Lords. Most media attention has been on the main argument by human rights groups that the law is discriminatory because it allows foreigners to be detained indefinitely while British citizens enjoy full civil rights. This is one of the many occasions when liberals should be careful of what they wish for.

The Government could very easily become a model of impartiality by interning British citizens alongside the alleged enemy aliens. David Blunkett has dropped strong hints that he would want to do just that if there was an Islamist attack on Britain, and I doubt if he would be stopped by a wave of public revulsion.

Far less attention has been given to the ruling by two of the three judges on the Court of Appeal that it was fine to hold men on the basis of evidence extracted by torture. No one can actually say that this happened because, contrary to all the principles of English justice, they aren’t allowed to know what they are meant to have done. But their lawyers suspect that they have been jailed because of confessions from inmates at Guantanamo Bay who have been threatened with dogs, stripped and kept in solitary confinement. Their allegation goes way beyond the charge that the security services followed up leads from brutal foreign agencies. It suggests that people are being held indefinitely in British jails because a naked man beset by dogs named him to placate his tormentors.

So what, snapped the Court of Appeal. There is no other way, blubbed Lord Falconer.

Their accommodation with torture is astonishing on many levels. The first is its hypocrisy. The court said that the British state was still forbidden from conniving in or procuring torture. If its agents reached for the cosh or the electric flex, they would be breaking the law. But if evidence extracted by foreign torturers was now admissible, why should the gloves be kept on British hardmen? Why should our boys be held back simply because of their British citizenship?

The Court of Appeal had no coherent answer, and the nonchalance with which it endorsed foreign torturers showed how feeble national traditions have become. Until the war of terror, it was inconceivable that an English court would accept that a man could be jailed on the basis of torture, albeit torture conducted by shifty foreigners. The English didn’t do torture. Uniquely in medieval Christendom, the English common law forbad the extraction of evidence under duress.

The exception to the benign rule was the Court of Star Chamber, which was allowed to torture the king’s enemies. Its barbaric practices were one cause of the civil war. Such was the hatred it aroused that ‘Star Chamber justice’ remains a contemptuous condemnation of arbitrary power to this day.

Writing at the high point of liberal Victorian self-confidence Lord Macaulay said that Star Chamber was an aberration which, ‘after the lapse of more than two centuries,’ was still ‘held in deep abhorrence by the nation’. It ‘displayed a rapacity, a violence, a malignant energy, which had been unknown to any former age’. I’m not sure if the English can be quite as self-confident about the decency of the national tradition today. It’s not that Star Chamber is back, rather that, as with so many other services, torture has been out-sourced to the third world where bothersome regulation is less intrusive.

What is dispiriting about the degeneracy of the Government and the Court of Appeal is that the old lessons have to be learned once again. The reasons why first England and then the civilised world rejected torture were practical as well as moral. Most people break under torture. Most people say whatever they have to say to stop the pain. When names are suggested to them, they agree. If the torturer wants to implicate the innocent or invent imaginary plots, he usually gets what he wants from his victim.

If the Law Lords doubt the wisdom of centuries and are considering upholding the Court of Appeal’s verdict, may I suggest a small experiment? If they give me a law officer, the Lord Chancellor perhaps, or the Director of Public Prosecutions, and a couple of heavies, and leave us alone in a locked room, I think I can guarantee that within a week he will have revealed that the entire senior judiciary are members of al-Qaeda.

The Guardian – How can Britain stoop so low? (Press Review)

Michael Portillo Sunday Times, October 17

“‘We are selling our souls for dross.’ So wrote Craig Murray, ambassador to Uzbekistan, referring to the fact that Britain and the United States are accepting intelligence extracted from suspects under torture. Mr Murray is offended on moral grounds that the western democracies are in the market for information beaten out of prisoners. He also believes that we are being bamboozled, because terrified captives will say whatever their interrogators demand and then the nasty regime in Tashkent spices it up to make us believe that it is on the front line against al-Qaida.

“The reaction of the Foreign Office has been to defend the UK’s practice, saying that it would be irresponsible to disregard leads obtained under duress, and to dismiss Mr Murray as ambassador. How has Britain come to stoop so low? One of the things that defined us as a nation was our abhorrence of brutality. How can it be then we also encourage foreign governments to mistreat prisoners?”

Financial Times Editorial, October 16

“The Tashkent tyranny of President Islam Karimov is one of the worst in the world, with more than 5,000 political prisoners and capable of boiling men to death. Its value as a forward US base for Afghanistan operations has given it the confidence to sell a long-running campaign against internal dissidents as part of the campaign against al-Qaida. That is a confidence trick the west appears willing to fall for.

“The moral and legal case against torture should not need further argument. Unhappily, it needs to be continually restated in opposition not only to what goes on in such places as Uzbekistan, but in US-run facilities such as Guant?namo, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram in Afghanistan. As for the Foreign Office, if it sends a principled person to advance an unprincipled policy it is not only incompetent but riding for a fall – and deservedly so.”

Independent Editorial, October 16

“Over two years in Uzbekistan, Mr Murray had been outspoken about the abuse of human rights in that former Soviet republic. He might have got away with this hardly controversial view – indeed, he says he had cleared all his public speeches with the Foreign Office – had he not gone on to query the extent to which the US and Britain were turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in states such as Uzbekistan for the sake of the ‘war on terror’. Implicating a third country, let alone a close ally, is a bigger offence than merely criticising your own.

“Earlier this year, the Foreign Office produced a new mission statement, which placed combating global terrorism and weapons of mass destruction at the top of its priorities, followed by protection from illegal immigration, drug trafficking and international crime. Human rights occupied the sixth of eight places. Craig Murray was working to the old agenda. Good for him.”

Times Editorial, October 16

“As laudable as Mr Murray’s motives were, his methods were self-indulgent. As ambassador he had unique access to [the Uzbek] regime via channels closed even to the most assiduous journalists, and his duty was to use them to advance Britain’s interests, especially in security and trade, as well as those of Uzbekistan’s oppressed dissidents and moderate Muslims.

“He described himself this week as a ‘victim of conscience’. If so, the right time to salve his conscience, and the most effective time from the point of view of those he seeks to help, would have been at a post-resignation press conference. Mr Murray is guilty of naivety.”

Daily Express Editorial, October 16

“Craig Murray has accused MI6 of using information obtained by the Uzbek government through torture: the Foreign Office has responded by claiming Mr Murray arranged visas in exchange for sex with women. Mr Murray fiercely denies the claims.

“This is no way for Britain to be conducting her foreign affairs in public: both parties should pipe down. But what is most depressing is this: Mr Murray emerges as far more credible than the Foreign Office. What a sad decline in our country if we can even imagine that one of the great departments of state is capable of telling a lie.”

Daily Telegraph Editorial, October 16

“Compromises must be made during wars, of course. In the face of the Soviet menace, we propped up a number of brutal tyrants, telling ourselves, ‘He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.’ In this case, though, it is far from clear that such an attitude serves western interests. The fact is that there is virtually no religious fundamentalism in Uzbekistan. The traveller to central Asia sees beards or headscarves rarely, and hears few calls to prayer.

“But President Karimov’s claim that he is besieged by Muslim fanatics may eventually prove self- fulfilling. If they are offered no other outlet for their hatred of the regime, Uzbeks may indeed turn to fundamentalism. The quickest way to finish off the extremists in central Asia would be to encourage the development of property rights and political pluralism. What a pity that saying so should be a sacking offence.”

The Guardian – Undiplomatic truths (Leader)

Foreign Office mandarins may well be irritated by the undiplomatic behaviour of Craig Murray, who has been formally removed as British ambassador to Uzbekistan. But he has raised a vital issue that lies at the heart of the “war on terror” and this country’s role in it. Mr Murray’s complaint, unrelated to questions about his professional performance, private life and health, is that MI6 has been using bogus intelligence obtained under torture by a government with a dire human rights record. His objections, raised in an internal FCO memo and amplified in media interviews yesterday, is that this practice should be eschewed on moral, legal and practical grounds.

Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic of 26 million people, has found its strategic importance greatly enhanced by the way the world has changed since 9/11. President Islam Karimov now plays host to a US base that is crucial to military operations in neighbouring Afghanistan. But violence has also come to his own backyard, with bomb blasts and shoot-outs in Tashkent and near the Silk Road city of Bukhara. Uzbek officials insist they are fighting militants linked to al-Qaida. Foreigners point to poverty and the imprisonment of dissident Muslims angered by a crackdown on those who worship outside state-run mosques. Every year about 200 people are executed in Uzbekistan, with the killings carried out in secret and families denied a last meeting with convicted relatives. Amnesty International receives regular and credible allegations of unfair trials, ill-treatment and torture – described as “endemic” by a UN envoy – often to extract confessions. The information – “dross,” says this renegade diplomat- is passed to the US, and thence to UK intelligence and security bodies.

Mr Murray’s complaint fits into a broader and worrying pattern that is visible both at home and abroad. The Guant?namo Bay and Abu Ghreib prison scandals have done much to tarnish the legitimate effort to prevent terrorist atrocities. The law lords are due to rule shortly on the highly controversial question of whether British courts may use evidence extracted under torture as long as British agents are not complicit in the abuse. It is only three weeks since Sir Ivor Roberts, the British ambassador to Italy, described George Bush as al-Qaida’s best recruiting sergeant, though his remarks were made in private. The more junior Mr Murray has been bolder in speaking out publicly. His career prospects – and an eventual knighthood – are now looking distinctly uncertain. But he has performed a valuable public service by following the dictates of his conscience.

By Peter Graff ? Reuters

British spies “lap up” information gathered through torture, hurting Britain’s ability to fight for human rights, the ambassador to Uzbekistan has said in a leaked memo obtained by Reuters.

In the memo, ambassador Craig Murray complained to superiors in London that British officials were “selling their souls for dross” — accepting bogus confessions tortured out of detainees and designed to trick Washington and London into supporting Uzbekistan’s harsh policies and giving it military aid.

Reuters obtained the secret July memo on Monday from a source who requested anonymity. Excerpts from it also appeared in the Financial Times on Monday.

“We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek Security Services, via the U.S. We should stop,” Murray wrote. “This is morally, legally and practically wrong.

The practice “fatally undermines our moral standing. It obviates my efforts to get the Uzbek government to stop torture; they are fully aware our intelligence community laps up the results.”

A spokeswoman for the foreign office declined to comment on the memo itself but said: “Britain never uses torture to get information.”

But she added: “We recognise there is a need for intelligence on counterterrorism to protect the safety of British nationals. It would be irresponsible to rule this information out of hand.”

Uzbekistan, an ex-Soviet republic in central Asia, has become an ally of the United States since the September 11 attacks, offering air bases for warplanes flying over Afghanistan. It denies it systematically practises torture.

Its government has battled Islamist guerrillas, some of whom were based in Afghanistan. But human rights groups say Uzbekistan has exaggerated the threat to win Western support and justify draconian policies, including torture.

Murray said he had raised his concern in London and was briefed by Foreign Office officials that it was “not illegal for Britain to obtain and use intelligence obtained through torture” as long as the information was not used as evidence in trials.

He was also briefed by an official from British intelligence who told him that spies found “some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror”.

But Murray said the material was disinformation designed to trick the United States and Britain into giving aid.

“TORTURED DUPES”

“Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the U.S. and the UK to believe: that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.

“I repeat that this material is useless — we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful,” he wrote.

“The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.”

Murray said Britain’s own spy agency lacked the knowledge to evaluate the material, which it received from the American CIA.

“MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment,” he wrote.

He described meeting an old man who was forced to watch his sons being tortured until he signed a confession admitting links to Osama bin Laden. “Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with bin Laden as I do.”

Britain has never denied that its spies use information that may have been obtained through torture abroad. In fact, the government has argued that it should be allowed to use such information in tribunals determining whether foreign terrorism suspects can be held without charge.

The High Court upheld that practice, which is now before a panel of the House of Lords sitting as Britain’s highest court.

The Foreign Office spokeswoman said Britain’s policy toward Uzbekistan is “political engagement”. “We are pushing Uzbekistan to fully implement a plan of action to stop torture.”

The Guardian – Tony Blair’s new friend (by George Monbiot)

The British and US governments gave three reasons for going to war with Iraq. The first was to extend the war on terrorism. The second was to destroy its weapons of mass destruction before they could be deployed. The third was to remove a brutal regime, which had tortured and murdered its people.

If the purpose of the war was to defeat terrorism, it has failed. Before the invasion, there was no demonstrable link between al-Qaida and Iraq. Today, al-Qaida appears to have moved into that country, to exploit a new range of accessible western targets. If the purpose of the war was to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction before he deployed them, then, as no such weapons appear to have existed, it was a war without moral or strategic justification.

So just one excuse remains, and it is a powerful one. Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. While there was no legal argument for forcibly deposing him on the grounds of his abuse of human rights, there was a moral argument. It is one which our prime minister made repeatedly and forcefully. “The moral case against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case for removing Saddam,” Tony Blair told the Labour party’s spring conference in February. “Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity. It is leaving him there that is in truth inhumane.”

Had millions of British people not accepted this argument, Tony Blair might not be prime minister today. There were many, especially in the Labour party, who disagreed with his decision but who did not doubt the sincerity of his belief in the primacy of human rights.

There is just one test of this sincerity, and that is the consistency with which his concern for human rights guides his foreign policy. If he cares so much about the welfare of foreigners that he is prepared to go to war on their behalf, we should expect to see this concern reflected in all his relations with the governments of other countries. We should expect him, for example, to do all he can to help the people of Uzbekistan.

There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water. Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death.

His crime, like that of many of the country’s prisoners, was practising his religion. Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, learned his politics in the Soviet Union. He was appointed under the old system, and its collapse in 1991 did not interrupt his rule. An Islamist terrorist network has been operating there, but Karimov makes no distinction between peaceful Muslims and terrorists: anyone who worships privately, who does not praise the president during his prayers or who joins an organisation which has not been approved by the state can be imprisoned. Political dissidents, human rights activists and homosexuals receive the same treatment. Some of them, like in the old Soviet Union, are sent to psychiatric hospitals.

But Uzbekistan is seen by the US government as a key western asset, as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq once was. Since 1999, US special forces have been training Karimov’s soldiers. In October 2001, he gave the United States permission to use Uzbekistan as an airbase for its war against the Taliban. The Taliban have now been overthrown, but the US has no intention of moving out. Uzbekistan is in the middle of central Asia’s massive gas and oil fields. It is a nation for whose favours both Russia and China have been vying. Like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it is a secular state fending off the forces of Islam.

So, far from seeking to isolate his regime, the US government has tripled its aid to Karimov. Last year, he received $500m (?300m), of which $79m went to the police and intelligence services, who are responsible for most of the torture. While the US claims that its engagement with Karimov will encourage him to respect human rights, like Saddam Hussein he recognises that the protection of the world’s most powerful government permits him to do whatever he wants. Indeed, the US state department now plays a major role in excusing his crimes. In May, for example, it announced that Uzbekistan had made “substantial and continuing progress” in improving its human rights record. The progress? “Average sentencing” for members of peaceful religious organisations is now just “7-12 years”, while two years ago they were “usually sentenced to 12-19 years”.

There is little question that the power and longevity of Karimov’s government has been enhanced by his special relationship with the United States. There is also little question that supporting him is a dangerous game. All the principal enemies of the US today were fostered by the US or its allies in the past: the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Wahhabi zealots in Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein and his people in Iraq. Dictators do not have friends, only sources of power. They will shift their allegiances as their requirement for power demands. The US supported Islamist extremists in Afghanistan in order to undermine the Soviet Union, and created a monster. Now it is supporting a Soviet-era leader to undermine Islamist extremists, and building up another one.

So what of Tony Blair, the man who claims that human rights are so important that they justify going to war? Well, at the beginning of this year, he granted Uzbekistan an open licence to import whatever weapons from the United Kingdom Mr Karimov fancies. But his support goes far beyond that. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has repeatedly criticised Karimov’s crushing of democracy movements and his use of torture to silence his opponents. Like Roger Casement, the foreign office envoy who exposed the atrocities in the Congo a century ago, Murray has been sending home dossiers which could scarcely fail to move anyone who cares about human rights.

Blair has been moved all right: moved to do everything he could to silence our ambassador. Mr Murray has been threatened with the sack, investigated for a series of plainly trumped-up charges and persecuted so relentlessly by his superiors that he had to spend some time, like many of Karimov’s critics, in a psychiatric ward, though in this case for sound clinical reasons. This pressure, according to a senior government source, was partly “exercised on the orders of No 10”.

In April, Blair told us that he had decided that “to leave Iraq in its brutalised state under Saddam was wrong”. How much credibility does this statement now command, when the same man believes that to help Uzbekistan remain in its brutalised state is right?

The ‘war on terror’ must not become a cover to support repressive regimes, Robin Cook, Independent, 24 October 2003

I do not know whether, as the press have claimed all week, our ambassador to Uzbekistan has been “recalled”, but I remember Craig Murray as a conscientious and earnest diplomat. I am only too familiar with his dilemma on how to maintain civil relations with a very uncivil regime.

Uzbekistan is a challenging case for human rights advocates. Amnesty International sums up its record with the blunt word, “dire”. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has reported that its use in Uzbekistan is “systematic”. The Foreign Office, to its credit, provides a frank exposure of the failings of the regime in the recent edition of its Human Rights Annual Report, which Labour started publishing on taking office. The section on Uzbekistan registers the case of two prisoners who were tortured to death with boiling water, and is illustrated with a photograph of inmates at a “notoriously brutal” prison. Our ambassador’s excellent speech on the need for Uzbekistan to improve its standards is reprinted as an annexe to the Annual Report (which suggests approval rather than reprimand from his ministers).

To describe the practices in such countries as human rights violations does not rise to the occasion. We are not contemplating simply a legalistic breach of a multilateral code, but brutal abuse of individual persons, who will have suffered excruciating agony and cowed in terror from the next interrogation. Silence is not an option for the international community in the face of the screams of the victims of torture. In Britain we enjoy the right to express ourselves freely without fear that we or our families will be imprisoned and beaten for our views. As Tony Blair never tires of reminding us, with rights come responsibilities, and the high standard of human rights that we enjoy puts on us a special responsibility to speak up for those peoples who are denied liberty.

Repressive regimes tend to resent criticism from outside as much as dissent from the inside. They are given to pleading that the West is committing a form of cultural imperialism when it imposes its standards of liberty, free speech and popular democracy. This is self-serving nonsense. There is no evidence that the peoples, rather than the governments, of any country regard torture and arbitrary imprisonment as an important part of their national heritage. As Kofi Annan memorably observed, African mothers also weep when their sons or daughters are killed or maimed. We see their tears on television in our living rooms. We are witnesses to their suffering, and if we stay silent we become accomplices in their oppression.

We can also make a practical difference as well as a rhetorical statement. In the case of Uzbekistan, the Foreign Office is advising on judicial reform, training judges and funding the recording of court proceedings. The next stage is to broaden the investigative capacity of the police, who now rely on confessions in police custody, which in turn provides the incentive for brutality.

I never met anyone in my years as Foreign Secretary who was prepared to defend torture as a valid government method. Regrettably I came across many in the media who were prepared to mutter that it was none of our business what governments did to their own citizens and our job was not to upset the people with power. This is profoundly short-sighted. It is a welcome feature of the modern world that repressive regimes are on the retreat, partly because of the incompatibility of an information economy with mediaeval repression. Those foreign powers who have supported human rights will be better able to do business with the more representative political leaders who displace authoritarian governments.

I remember visiting Nigeria shortly after the death of General Sani Abacha had opened the path for a return to democracy. Our high commissioner there had gone straight from being the least favoured foreign diplomat, because of our trenchant criticism of Abacha’s brutality and corruption, to being one of the most influential on the new authorities, for exactly the same reason. Some day the ageing military junta in Burma will fall and Britain will be in a stronger position for the support our embassy has given to Aung San Suu Kyi. We should support human rights because it is the right course to take, but in the long run what is right in principle usually turns out to be right in practice.

This brings us back to Uzbekistan, which justifies its repression as a necessary tool against Islamic militants. We should not be romantic about the nature of militant dissent. If fundamentalists were successful in sweeping aside the present regime, they would not replace it with an inclusive government promoting individual liberty and respecting freedom of speech. But they will not be beaten by violence and repression, which only provide them with more martyrs. Nor does the existence of a fundamentalist movement justify the Karimov regime in suppressing bona fide critics of their human rights record: that only gives their population fresh reason to fear the regime and welcome its removal. If the government of Uzbekistan really wants to isolate the terrorists, it needs to make a common cause with those in their nation who want a more open society than either President Karimov offers at present or the fundamentalists hope to impose in the future.

There is a similar message for the Bush administration to ponder. It is rumoured that the British ambassador to Tashkent has fallen out of favour not so much because he upset the government of Uzbekistan, but because that in turn upset the government of the US, which has secured a base from which to prosecute its operations in Afghanistan. We have been here before. Nothing more discredited the conduct of the West in the Cold War than its willingness to form alliances with reactionary regimes around the globe to whom freedom and democracy were strange and threatening concepts. It would be a tragedy if the Bush administration were to revert to turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in order to find allies in its War on Terror.

It would also be a political blunder. We will only beat the terrorists if we stand by the values of liberty, tolerance and non-violence which are the strengths of the open societies they want to destroy. We provide grist to the propaganda mill of the fundamentalists if we allow ourselves to be associated with regimes who have as little compunction as the terrorists in using violence for their own ends. Terrorism will not be beaten by security measures alone and must be defeated politically.

None of this means that making progress on human rights is going to be easy. But there are no voices more irritating than the world-weary who argue that because we cannot make the world perfect we should give up trying to make it better. The growing interdependence of countries gives us ever greater opportunities for economic leverage and political persuasion of repressive regimes. If we refuse to take these opportunities, we ourselves share responsibility for the agony and the terror of the tortured victims of the regimes with whom we connive without protest.

The Guardian – Ambassador accused after criticising US (by David Leigh, Nick Paton Walsh, Ewen MacAskill)

Britain’s ambassador in Tashkent, who mysteriously returned to this country last month on temporary sick leave, was the victim of threats from Downing Street related to his outspoken views on US foreign policy in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

Inquiries by the Guardian have discovered that Craig Murray, one of Britain’s youngest ambassadors, was subsequently called back from his Uzbekistan post, threatened with the loss of his job, and accused of a miscellaneous string of diplomatic shortcomings in what his friends say is a wholly unfair way.

The accusations against him included:

? Supporting the visa application of the daughter of an Uzbek family friend who overstayed in England;

? Drinking too convivially with Uzbek locals;

? Allowing an embassy Land Rover to be driven down steps.

Mr Murray’s subsequent episode of depression, for which he had medical treatment, was preceded by what one Foreign Office source calls “a campaign of systematic undermining”.

A senior source said the former ambassador had been put under pressure to stop his repeated criticisms of the brutal Karimov regime, accused among other things of boiling prisoners to death. The source said the pressure was partly “exercised on the orders of No 10”, which found his outspokenness about the compromises Washington was prepared to make in its “war on terror” increasingly embarrassing in the lead up to the Iraq war.

“He was told that the next time he stepped away from the Ameri can line, he would lose his post,” said the source. During a visit earlier this year at the height of the political tensions prior to the Iraq invasion, the former development secretary, Clare Short, is reported to have said to him: “I love the job you are doing down here, but you know, don’t you, that if I go, you go.” She eventually resigned over the Iraq war.

When the affable and energetic Scottish diplomat arrived in Tashkent a year ago at the age of 45, he was a rising star. He had survived the 1998 Sierra Leone scandal, and indeed been promoted.

A firm run by Lt Col Tim Spicer, accused of shipping arms to war-torn Sierra Leone, claimed to have got approval from Mr Murray, then deputy head of the Equatorial Africa department. But Mr Murray told an inquiry he had been “set up” by Spicer, and a committee of MPs absolved him of anything other than “a certain naivety”.

Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet police state on the strategically important border with Afghanistan, was another potential political minefield. Uzbek security services use “torture as a routine investigation technique”, according to the US State Department. But Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led them to finance much of the regime’s security apparatus. In exchange the US gets a military base in Khanabad as a centre for operations in Afghanistan. Last year Washington gave the government $500m (?298m) in aid, $79m of which was specifically for the same “law enforcement and security services” they accused of routine torture.

Mr Murray upset the regime of President Islam Karimov with his blunt remarks on torture. His comments also began to accentuate the differences in the Foreign Office’s supposed ethical foreign policy and its support for US actions. In October last year at Freedom House, Mr Murray read a speech that had been cleared by the Foreign Office to the assembled dignitaries, including top Uzbek officials and the US ambassador.

He said: “We believe there to be between 7,000 and 10,000 people in detention whom we would consider as political and/or religious prisoners. No government has the right to use the war against terrorism as an excuse for the persecution of those with a deep personal commitment to the Islamic religion, and who pursue their views by peaceful means.”

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, brought Mr Murray’s hard-hitting speech up in a meeting with Mr Karimov. This was said to have incensed Mr Karimov. Mr Murray sent numerous reports to London about human rights abuses, and his dispatches became increasingly heated during the build-up to the Iraqi invasion. He argued Uzbekistan’s human rights abuses were as bad as those being used as ammunition against Baghdad. Yet Washington was financing Uzbekistan, rather than invading it, he said.

He received many internal emails of support, and some of criticism. He became personally involved in exposing torture, commissioning a forensic report on the bodies of two political prisoners, Muzafar Avazov and Husnidin Alimov, which concluded they had probably been boiled to death.

Last June a Foreign Office investigator arrived in Tashkent following an unconnected row in which an embassy official had sacked three locally hired staff. According to local sources, the investigator kept asking pointed questions about the ambassador himself.

“Somebody seems to be out to get him,” one source noted at the time. The report is said to have exonerated the ambassador from any blame for the personnel problems.

But in August, when Mr Murray went on holiday, a second investigator went out to Tashkent. He appears to have gleaned allegations of ambassadorial indiscretion.

According to friends, Mr Murray had supported the visa request of a young Uzbek girl who wanted to study in Britain. The daughter of a distinguished Uzbek professor, she had been granted a visa to attend a month-long course. Yet she stayed on afterwards for about 10 days of tourism. The consul section of the embassy became agitated, and asked Mr Murray to intervene. Mr Murray rang her father, and asked for her swift return.

In Who’s Who, he lists “drinking and gossiping” as his recreations. But one source close to the embassy insisted: “I have never seen Craig drunk at work. He knew how to entertain as part of his job, but he was not a drinker. It’s absurd.” Another source said: “He had a lot of respect from a lot of people. That would not have happened if he was drunk.”

His driver was said to have driven an embassy Land Rover down some terraced steps to get to a lake shore, on an embassy picnic. “He was just showing how well-built the British car was,” joked one friend. “I heard another senior embassy official drove another one down there im mediately behind him. But he wasn’t disciplined.”

Yet Mr Murray was called back from holiday to London, and threatened with demotion or the sack.

“One can certainly suppose the Uzbeks hated him,” said one Tashkent source close to the embassy. “There is no solid information on American involvement, but people close to him seemed to think they knew it had happened that way.” A US official at their Tashkent embassy said: “The US government had nothing to do with Mr Murray’s leaving Uzbekistan.”

The Foreign Office denies that the US has put pressure on Downing Street. It claims that if there had been such pressure, the FO would not have included critical comments about Uzbekistan in its annual human rights report last month.

A spokesman yesterday refused to comment on whether there were any disciplinary issues involving Mr Murray. He insisted that he remains the ambassador to Uzbekistan.