Fat vicious Australian bigot talking now about how good Cameron is

7.42 Alistair Campbell giving us his “Gordon will win” spin. Unemployed war criminal predicts…

Channel 4 Dispatches used to be a haven of serious documentary, but has degenerated into a stream of Islamophobia. It touched rock bottom today with a truly pathetic effort by Andrew Gilligan which found – shock horror – Muslims in the East London mosque!

These Muslims actually wanted society to be ordered in an Islamic way on Islamic principles. To try to achieve this they were – shock horror – undertaking political activity and joining political parties!

Gilligan’s piece turned on the Daily Express trick of attempting to inculcate fear that suddenly you and I will wake up under sharia law. The fact is of course that no matter how much devout Muslims may want to campaign to ban alcohol and push-up bras in the UK, they have not a hope in hell of succeeding.

But surely they have a right to their beliefs and ideology and a right to espouse it? Surely we should be delighted that these Muslims are seeking to advance their views through participation in the democratic process and not through violence? In fact, is this not the sort of activity we should be encouraging?

Apparently not. Apparently you only should be allowed to participate in politics if the ideology you are offering to the electorate is broadly the same as Andrew Gilligan’s. We were apparently supposed especially to be shocked by Gilligan’s revelation that Muslim activists campaigned for George Galloway because of his opposition to the Iraq war and support for the Palestinians. Wow! Whatever next?

Gilligan went on to introduce a number of neo-conservative nutters from wild eyed groups such as the Centre for Social Cohesion, to condemn all this “extremist” activity, without giving any context to explain where his “Independent” commentators were dredged up from.

Gilligan’s only useful point was about the waste of taxpayers’ money being pumped in to various Muslim groupings. Sadly he confined his criticism on this point only to financial support for those Muslim groups who did not wholeheartedly support the Bush/Blair foreign policy, when in fact twenty times more public money has been wasted on tiny but grasping Muslim groups who proselytise Blairism.

All in all, the most risible piece of half-baked Islamophobia I can recall. Gilligan – a man for whom I have had respect – should be ashamed of himself.

I am a great fan of BBC Radio 4 in general, so I am really pleased that this is quite a coup for them.

World Premiere of Murder in Samarkand by Sir David Hare

Based on the memoir by Craig Murray.

Saturday 20 February 2010 at 2.30pm BBC Radio 4 “The Saturday Play”.

Starring

David Tennant as Craig Murray

Jemima Rooper as Nadira

Directed by Clive Brill

There is a large and truly impressive cast of some of the finest stage actors in Britain. Nadira herself plays Dilobar as well as two or three other small parts. I will link to a full cast list as soon as the BBC publish it.

I watched David Tennant’s Hamlet over Christmas and was very impressed, so I am delighted to have him as my alter ego. I have to confess to being a Dr Who fan ever since William Hartnell. I actually knitted myself a Tom Baker scarf

Of course, David Tennant is not really good looking enough to play me, but it’ll be OK on radio.

UPDATE:Recording has now finished. I couldn’t be in the studio as I am in Africa. Possibly that’s not a bad thing: if I were playing someone I don’t thnk I would want him around watching. But Nadira and several others have told me the atmosphere in the studio was brilliant, and at times electric.

If you click on the link in the top left margin you can buy a copy of Murder in Samarkand and read the book before you hear the play – or you can get it from your local library.

I own up – I am reposting this really because a Monday morning post gets, all other things being equal, three times the readership of a Sunday evening post.

I was a British Ambassador at the time of the events covered by the Iraq Inquiry. I know many of the witnesses and a great deal of the background. I can therefore see right through the smooth presentation. Jack Straw was the smoothest of all – but he told lie after lie.

Straw’s biggest and most important lie goes right to the heart of the question of whether the war was legal. Did UN Security Council Resolution 1441 provide a legal basis for the invasion, or would a second resolution specifically authorising military action have been required? The UK certainly put a massive amount of diplomatic effort into obtaining a second resolution.

Here is Straw’s argument that the invasion was legal without a second resolution:

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Then you make a point very strongly in your statement and this has been confirmed by Sir Jeremy Greenstock that you did not believe that

military action thereafter, in the event of noncompliance, would depend on a second resolution. It would be desirable but it wasn’t dependent on that. We are not, today, going into the legal arguments on that. Sir Jeremy’s basic contention was that he had got the Americans and British into a comparable position as before Desert Fox in December 1998. So I think that’s

quite important, that your understanding, at least of the position, was that it wasn’t absolutely essential to have a second resolution.

RT HON JACK STRAW: I was not in any doubt about that and neither was Jeremy Greenstock, and for very good reasons, which is that there had been talk by the French and Germans of a draft which would have required a second resolution, but they never tabled it. We tabled a draft, which, as I set out in this memorandum, and which Sir Jeremy Greenstock confirms in his memorandum, was aimed to be selfcontained, in the sense that, if very important conditions were met through failures by the Saddam regime, that of itself would provide sufficient authority for military action, and no doubt the next time we will get into the wording of the resolution, which, as I say in this memorandum, I can virtually recite in my sleep, but there are reasons why in OP12 we use the language that we do, and serious consequences are mentioned in OP13 and so on. For sure, we wanted a second resolution after that and well, again, I set out

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: We will come on to that in a moment.

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43198/100121pm-straw.pdf

As Ambassador in an Islamic country, I was copied all or nearly all of the telegrams of instruction on the diplomatic efforts to secure a second resolution. I can tell you these facts as an eye-witness.

Straw argues that the proof that no second resolution was needed is that

I was not in any doubt about that and neither was Jeremy Greenstock, and for very good reasons, which is that there had been talk by the French and Germans of a draft which would have required a second resolution, but they never tabled it.

But they did not table it because we gave assurances to the French and Germans (and Russians and Chinese) that our draft of UNSCR 1441 did not authorise military action. The instructions were to inform those governments that UNSCR 1441 contained “no automatic trigger” which would lead to military action. I remember the phrase precisely “no automatic trigger”. Rod Lyne on the committee must remember it too, because he was one of the people, as Ambassador in Moscow, instructed to give that message.

It is the most perverse of lies by Straw to argue that the fact that the Germans and French did not table their draft proved that 1441 authorised war, when we had told them not to table their draft because 1441 did not authorise war.

I read with enormous care and in real time every single word of the scores of telegrams on the effort to secure the second resolution. Not one word gave any hint at all that a second resolution might not be necessary to authorise war. There was absolutely no mention in telegrams to Embassies of the notion that UNSCR 1441 was a sufficient basis for war, and no second resolution needed, until many weeks after 1441 was passed, just before the invasion.

STOP PRESS ADDITION

In response to New Labour hacks questioning my word, I can offer you irrefutable evidence to back up my own evidence that all the FCO material at the time of the adoption of UNSCR 1441 and for weeks afterwards right up until March, took the view that UNSCR 1441 did not provide legal grounds for the invasion.

It is the resignation letter of Deputy FCO Legal Adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst in which she stated:

“I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution to revive the authorisation given in SCR 678. I do not need to set out my reasoning; you are aware of it.

My views accord with the advice that has been given consistently in this office before and after the adoption of UN security council resolution 1441 and with what the attorney general gave us to understand was his view prior to his letter of 7 March. (The view expressed in that letter has of course changed again into what is now the official line.) “

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4377605.stm

All FCO instructions in the period to which I refer would have had to be in line with the view expressed by FCO legal advisers at that time. That view was precisely as I have stated it above.

This part of Straw’s evidence is therefore a huge lie.

There were numerous other minor lies from Straw. It is completely untrue that we had persuaded the three African security council members to support a second resolution authorising war. Baroness’ Amos mission to Francophone states we had ignored for years was a miserable failure. That was clear from reporting telegrams from posts.

It’s a small point, but Straw’s lie that upset me most personally was:

I don’t in the least mind people disagreeing with me, indeed I encourage it, but I do ask them to be loyal, because, otherwise, you can’t operate any kind of governmental system.

I disagreed with Straw, over the issue of the use of torture to gain intelligence in the “War on Terror”. I was very loyal. I kep my disagreement entirely internal and argued it in top secret telegrams and internal policy meetings. As a result of my disagreeing, Straw attempted to have me framed on false charges, destroying my health in the process and leaking false accusations to the tabloids to ruin my reputation too. When my name was finally cleared, they had to give me six year’s salary to settle.

I defy anyone to read Murder in Samarkand and say Straw is not a liar.

I often wonder how someone who looks like me can produce such incredibly beautiful children. I guess every parent finds their own children incredibly beautiful…

Jamie

Emily

This is the moment when Jonathan Powell admitted that Downing St was set on war irrespective of whether Saddam had WMD or not. This admission contradicted all the carefully constructed lies of key war criminals David Manning, Alistair Campbell and Jonathan Powell himself.

The implications of this passage could not be more stark. The aim was war. Whether or not Iraq had WMD was irrelevant. There was no interest in knowing the truth about WMD. Indeed to know the truth would be negative.

A ten year old could understand the crucial importance of what Powell said here. But the hand picked committee of pro-war cronies failed completely to pick up on it.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: I mean, Sir David Manning and

8 Sir Jeremy Greenstock both said, but differently, that

9 they would have liked to have had more time, but you

10 don’t agree with that?

11 MR JONATHAN POWELL: No, we asked for more time repeatedly

12 from January onwards of the President, and we got more

13 time in each case. Eventually, by the time we got to

14 midMarch, he wasn’t going to give us more time and the

15 French veto knocked any chance

16 SIR RODERIC LYNE: He wasn’t going to give us more time. If

17 we had had more time, if the inspectors had had longer,

18 there had been longer to build up the picture and you

19 had continued these extraordinary diplomatic efforts

20 that you described, would there not have been a chance,

21 at that stage, of actually gathering the international

22 support that we had not managed to gather by then?

23 MR JONATHAN POWELL: No. I mean, if you think about it,

24 Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. We were

25 wrong. The intelligence was wrong. So, no matter how

82

1 long you had carried the inspections on, they weren’t

2 going to find anything, and, from what we know of

3 Saddam, it is extremely unlikely that he would have

4 cooperated. So we would have been in exactly the same

5 situation for months and months and months. There would

6 have been no discovery of weapons of mass destruction,

7 but 8

SIR RODERIC LYNE: But one way or the other they might have

9 built up a more convincing picture, if they had had more

10 time.

11 MR JONATHAN POWELL: A convincing picture of what?

12 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Well, a picture to convince the people

13 who weren’t not convinced by our arguments in March.

14 MR JONATHAN POWELL: But if there weren’t weapons of mass

15 destruction, we wouldn’t have been able you are

16 asking me in retrospect, “Would we have had more time?”

17 The answer is more time would have achieved nothing.

18 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Thank you very much.

I very much doubt that Blair will enter the Iraq Inquiry via the front door. He can get in to the QE2 Conference Centre from the back by passing through the Institute of Mechanical Engineers building. That seems pretty likely. A strong detachment armed with buckets of blood should watch that route.

Or he can arrive by an underground route using the spur to the QE2 conference centre from the old tunnel that connected Bomber Command (now known as The Citadel bunker) in Marsham St to the Cabinet Office and the MOD. As this tunnel network is an official secret I doubt they will want to risk him appearing mysteriously from nowhere, though.

Radovan Karadzic

Saddam Hussein

Jonathan Powell

…when everyone has been having so much fun in comments without me. On Friday the connection, which had been almost unusable for three days, failed completely, and the phone lines too. Vodafone blame Friday evening’s storm, but the problem had started long before that.

Fascinating comment from Sembe:

At 3kbps, you should be using a simplifying proxy server like loband.org. For urgent communications, it might be best to set up a telnet service (using pine for email, lynx for web surfing).

Internet telephony services in Ghana are routed through the SAT-3/WASC cable, which is jointly owned by Ghana Telecom and 35 other telecoms. Local ISPs are assigned 2Mbps bandwidth, and supply it to subscribers at an average speed of 1kbps.

The common alternative is to use a VSAT satellite system, but this is more expensive and is rather clogged in West Africa. Additionally, MTN & Zain are now offering GSM or 3G mobile access.

Things are set to improve, though. Glo has just laid the Glo1 fibre optic cable from UK to Nigeria, which should be operational soon, and the Main One cable from Portugal should be installed by May 2010.

My emphasis.

The sad truth is that every advance in new technology leaves Africa falling further and further behind.

supply it to subscribers at an average speed of 1kbps

. Think about that.

We had a microwave link to a satellite provider which theoretically gave us dedicated 512 kbps – for about $4,000 a month. My UK connection is 20 times faster and 200 times cheaper – so costs 4,000 times less per kbps. In fact our “dedicated” capacity had been sold many times over by the satellite ISP, Zipnet, and speedtests usually showed about 30kbps. Corrked ISPs are part of the whole complex problem

Last night the phone lines came back and I rushed down to post something when the electricity went off. This had happened so often in the last few days that the generator had run out of diesel, while a UPS only survives a few months coping with a dozen outages a day – and that is with a $10,000 voltage stabiliser on the house. [This was written yesterday and attempts throughout the day to post it failed. So I got up at 6am this morning to do it].

All this is in “normal” circumstances. Imagine the logistic nightmare facing the aid agencies in Haiti, with the same kind of level of base infrastructure, and then most of that destroyed by an earthquake.

It is worth reminding ourselves of the detail of the murders by Blackwater on which charges were recently dismissed in the US.

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/01/2010128143176494.html

And remembering that in the UK there has not even been any attempted legal action against hired killer Tim Spicer and his Aegis crew:

http://www.newstrend.com/2005/12/aegis-iraq-trophy-video-download.html

Coming back to London tonight after ultimately a very fruitful trip to Ghana, in which I was able to provide some useful (I hope) advice on changes to their offshore oil regime, so it will benefit Ghanaians more and big oil companies a bit less. Might post on that tomorrow.

Have to come back here in a week. But tomorrow morning I’ll see Nadira and Cameron, Emily will join us Saturday and I might even be able to track down Jamie in Dumfries.

Stoater of a post in my head about psychopaths – got to go to a meeting now but look out for it this afternoon.

Since his creative juices dried up, Gordon Sumner aka Sting has received most publicity for his very public environmentalism. As in

The Rainforest Foundation was founded in 1989 by Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, after they saw first-hand the destruction of the Amazon rainforests, and the devastating impact it had on the lives of the indigenous peoples who lived there.

Not, you would think, the kind of chap who would be likely to take the money to propagandise for the most vicious regime in the World. But there was Gordon on October 17 at the Navoi Opera House in Tashkent, performing a “Charity Concert” with Gulnara Karimova for some of the “Charities” which have been set up in the past three years as the regime seeks to burnish her image to take over from her dissident massacring father.

I bet the oligarchs loved it though:

Even the cheapest ticket will cost more than 45 times the average monthly salary in Uzbekistan

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006016

Karimova herself has had opponents murdered, has through her company Xeromax taken ownership of much of Uzbekistan’s pathetically little industry, and runs both the city’s nightclubs and the profitable industry sex trafficking Uzbek girls to Dubai.

But the greatest irony of the arch tosser Sumner’s involvement is that the Uzbek government not only tortures thousands every year, has ten thousand political prisoners and massacres demonstrators. It is also responsible for one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters – the disappearance of the Aral Sea, and the huge toxicity of the remnant and of the blown seabed dust.

The Uzbek government gets most of its money from the State cotton plantations – Uzbekistan is the World’s second biggest cotton exporter. The use of all the river water for irrigation of the

cotton is the direct cause of the Aral Sea disappearance. The massive amount of pesticide and fertiliser needed to maintain a hundred year single crop monoculture is causing the poisoning and birth defects. The crop is picked by hand by forced labour and especially child slave labour. The arsehole Sumner may not have noticed, but in the last three years even Wal-Mart, Marks and Spencers and Tesco have put a total ban on Uzbek cotton in all the clothing they sell.

Did it not occur to Sting to wonder just where his glamorous hostess gets her billions from? Karimov and his daughter have for decades resisted every attempt to liberalise and diversify Uzbekistan’s agriculture. The slaves pick for them. And for Sting, apparently.

So determined are the British mainstream media, and all three main English political parties, to maintain patriotic support for the War in Afghanistan, that there has been almost no reporting here of conclusive evidence that the Afghan elections were entirely fraudulent. There are huge discrepancies between the turnout as monitored by UN observers, and as declared by the Afghan “Independent” Electoral Commission. For example:

In Helmand province in the south, where Taliban fighters remain very active, for example, the U.N. estimated that just 38,000 votes were cast while Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission reported 122,376 votes for the top three candidates, including 112,873 for Karzai. In neighboring Kandahar, the U.N. estimated turnout at below 100,000 voters ?” compared to the commission’s official count of 242,782 votes, 221,436 of them for Karzai.

The interesting thing is that the UN itself has been complicit in covering this up, and the true figures have only been released by a whistleblower, Peter Galbraith, who has naturally been sacked. His motives are immaterial – it was wrong of the UN to suppress this information. For sheer bloody minded cynicism, the response from Edmond Mulet, assistant UN secretary general, takes the biscuit. He stated that the UN was mandated to support the Afghan election, not to monitor it.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ihcxyvLQTtUCreNe2jbrDczmO9aQD9B6JLT81

A smoother but still more cynical confirmation that the UN is going along with fraud came from the Head of the UN’s Afghan mission, Kai Eide, who stated that:

“If one is serious about state-building in Afghanistan, one must allow these nascent institutions to work and to grow. This means allowing them to make their own mistakes.”

This resonates strongly with me because it mirrors exactly the arguments I had with UN officials in Uzbekistan who refused to acknowledge the appalling human rights abuses in the country. In particular, UNICEF point blank would not report the massive use of forced labour of young children in the cotton fields, preferring instead to quote reports from Uzbek government institutions denying this.

Sadly, the majority of international diplomats, Eide and Mulet included, are high living careerists, fleas riding on the back of power, with no principles and with no empathy for the plight of people whose lifestyle does not include an unlimited supply of free champagne.

No, I really am. I think it could be malaria again, which would be about the seventh time. I feel rotten and when I sat down to blog, I had some great ideas. But now I can hardly see the keyboard, and the ideas seem wrong – like the one about using cats to run COBRA. Going to bed and calling the doctor. Probably is malaria.

Will blog later today if feel better. Meanwhile here are some much better sites to look at:

http://postmanpatel.blogspot.com/

http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggerheads.com/

http://www.chickyog.net/

http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/

http://subrosa-blonde.blogspot.com

http://theorangepartyblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/dark-and-dangerous-hospital-pfi-con.html

Just what comes to a fevered mind so don’t be insulted by exclusion.

By popular demand, more photos of Nadira here.

http://www.bloggerheads.com/nadira/gallery.html

I was reviewing my evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. The Committee’s main preoccupation was whether receipt of intelligence you know comes from torture, makes you complicit in that torture in terms of the UN Convention Against Torture. I seemed, at least to myself, the only person who was morally outraged at torture. The question troubling the Committee was, can the government, legally, get away with it?

This, from the uncorrected transcript, is part of their questioning of me on this point:

Mr Murray: I think the essence of the government’s position is that if you receive intelligence material from people who torture, be it CIA waterboarding, or torture by the Uzbek authorities or anywhere else, you can do so ad infinitum knowing that it may come from torture and you are still not complicit.

Q77 Dr Harris: The government say that they condemn the use of torture, do not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture and work hard to eradicate it, but they also say in their response to our report on the UN Convention Against Torture: “#Our rejection of the use of torture is well known by our liaison partners. The provenance of intelligence received from foreign services is often obscured as intelligence and security services, even where they share intelligence, rarely share the details of their sources. All intelligence received from foreign services is carefully evaluated. Where it is clear that the intelligence is being obtained from individuals in detention the UK agencies make clear to foreign services the standards which they expect them to comply with.” That does not say what you think it ought to say, but do you accept that their position is different from yours and that their current position is consistent with what Sir Michael Wood essentially said?

Mr Murray: Their position remains the one outlined by Sir Michael Wood, and it was put to me that if we received intelligence from torture we were not complicit as long as we did not do the torture ourselves or encouraged it. I argue that we are creating a market for torture and that there were pay-offs to the Uzbeks for their intelligence co-operation and pay-offs to other countries for that torture. I think that a market for torture is a worthwhile concept in discussing the government’s attitude.

Q78 Dr Harris: In your evidence you assert that Jack Straw himself as foreign secretary endorsed Sir Michael Wood’s view set out in that memorandum?

Mr Murray: Yes.

Q79 Dr Harris: That would not be a surprise in a sense given the government’s position that the Wood memorandum is at least consistent if not congruent with the government’s then, and presumably currently, position?

Mr Murray: What you say about the government’s position is true, but it has done everything possible to disguise its position. I received an email from the Bishop of Bath and Wells who had written to a government minister to say he was worried about the possibility that we were using intelligence from torture as highlighted by the Binyam Mohamed case. He got the reply that was always given which was to refer to the first part of the government’s position that you cited – the bit about condemning torture unreservedly – but not the second part. The government do not volunteer the fact that they very happily accept this information. I make it absolutely plain that I am talking of hundreds of pieces of intelligence every year that have come from hundreds of people who suffer the most vicious torture. We are talking about people screaming in agony in cells and our government’s willingness to accept the fruits of that in the form of hundreds of such reports every year. I want the Joint Committee to be absolutely plain about that.

And this is Philippe Sands questioned on the same point:

Q77 Dr Harris: You describe Lord Bingham’s words as providing a small opening to enable the government to come up with a position, but is it not the case that the government has leapt through it and relied very much on that approach? The 2008 annual report of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on human rights published in March 2009 says: “The use of intelligence possibly derived through torture presents a very real dilemma given our unreserved condemnation of torture and our efforts to eradicate it. Where there is intelligence that bears on threats to life we cannot reject it out of hand. What is quite clear however is that the information obtained as a result of torture would not be admissible in any criminal or civil proceedings in the UK.” They are just saying that is the position and they rely on that. They do not have to work very hard to do that, do they?

Professor Sands: In a sense they are fudging; they are expressing a commonsensical position. You get the odd bit of information that has been provided under torture. It provides information that may head off some serious attack. What do you do? Do you just ignore it? They are saying no. But what they are not addressing is whether or not there is a policy of systematic reliance on such information.

Q78 Dr Harris: What I have just read out is consistent with Lord Bingham’s judgment in your view.

Professor Sands: It may be. What I do not know is the factual background against which that is written. I have information about what is in the public domain. I have access to certain information through my professional practice as a barrister which for reasons you understand I cannot address in this forum. If they are talking about a very limited piece or pieces of information that may be one thing. It is quite another thing, if we take the scenario of those words, to imagine a situation in which Her Majesty’s Government engaged in an arrangement with a country that was known to torture in a widespread way and turned a blind eye to what was going on and received all the information but did not participate physically in the torture. I do not think Lord Bingham had that in mind.

Q79 Dr Harris: But what Mr Murray described as a schizophrenic approach could arise where they worked to stop torture. Let us take the instance of the government being merely a passive recipient of information but they know that it may well have been obtained under torture because they know it happens. They have no intention to use it in any proceedings, to comply with the judgment in A & Ors, but it may be stuff that they feel they are entitled to according to the bit of Lord Bingham’s speech that you read out. They will not know in advance; they cannot say, “Give the information to us next April because we think that it will contain information about a bomb in the House of Commons.” Is it not the case that, even though in Mr Craig’s words it seems schizophrenic, by being merely a passive recipient as long as they do everything else to stop it that is a consistent and possibly lawful policy given the case law provided by the House of Lords decision to which you have alluded?

Professor Sands: I do not think I can give a better answer than the one I have given. It might be depending on the particular facts, the regularity of the flow of information and the context in which the information arrived. I take your point, but perhaps I may turn it around a slightly different way. I have set out the criteria that I believe need to be met on the basis of case law and practice to determine when complicity arises. Essentially, there are three factors. First, there must be knowledge that torture is or is likely to take place.

Q80 Chairman: Does that include constructive knowledge?

Professor Sands: I think it would. In my view turning a blind eye in the face of overwhelming evidence would constitute knowledge for the purposes of the Committee Against Torture. Second – this is the crucial issue ?” there is a contribution by way of assistance. The question then becomes: at what point does the regular receipt of information that is known to have been obtained by torture amount in some way to a contribution? It depends on the factual scenario against which that happens. The third element is some material or substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime. If you go through those three elements you can begin to see a situation in which one-off accidental reliance on information would be in one category but systematic reliance on such information in the circumstances of knowledge of the background to an ongoing relationship with another state might well cross the line into complicity.

Q81 Chairman: It is the contribution by way of assistance that has a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime, so those are two of the three elements in the wording you identify in the ICTY judgment. I have no wish particularly to defend the government, but in a legal sense it is hard to see why passive receipt – I shall come on to receipt with gratitude – via an email box that you do not close, even with knowledge that torture is taking place and the rest of your embassy is saying, “Don’t torture”, is in itself is contribution by way of assistance or that it has a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime, because the fact that you are receiving it passively is not the reason they are doing it, is it?

Professor Sands: That would appear to be what Lord Bingham had in mind in the passage I read out, but what I am suggesting is that you must distinguish between different situations. There is a world of difference between the one-off receipt of information that comes into your mailbox and a relationship that is premised on regular, systematic, continual reliance against the background of a broader relationship between two sovereign entities.

You can read the full transcript from here:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/worse_than_expe.html#comments

Or you can view it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9spgagSHI

In sending in my corrections and clarifications, it occurred to me that the correct analogy with material from torture must be child porn. Child abuse is indeed a form of torture. It is abuse of the helpless. If you possess child pornography, you are viewed as guilty even if you had no part in making it. The law takes the view that you have encouraged the act by creating the market for the material, and that you must be depraved to want it. It seems to me that is all precisely true also of torture. And remember that in Uzbekistan, torture of children in front of parents was indeed one of the techniques used to get the “Intelligence”.

So try substituting “child abuse” for “torture” in the committee’s deliberations, and the argument about just how much Ministers may seebefore they are complicit in its production, takes on a whole new light.

I have included this argument in my comments on the transcript sent to the committee yesterday.

Download file

This is the uncorrected transcript of my evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights

Download file

I believe these excerpts give the key points in my evidence:

Q77 Chairman: To summarise where we are, we were not directly involved in torturing anybody in Uzbekistan, but effectively there was a chain that ended up with you in Tashkent via the CIA and MI6 in London. It is not like the allegations we have received regarding Pakistan, for example, where basically we are in the prison cell asking the questions and somebody may have been tortured. This is a much more remote chain of circumstances. Your argument is that because Uzbekistan is a country where torture is almost a way of life in that country evidence was being obtained by the CIA indirectly from the Uzbeks and then supplied to MI6 and the sum totality must have been known to ministers. Although we were not directly involved through that chain that is sufficient in your view to create an allegation of complicity by the UK in torture in Uzbekistan?

Mr Murray: I would agree with that.

Q78 Chairman: That is a summary of your case?

Mr Murray: I would add one point. My case is that because as an ambassador I was fortunately a member of the senior civil service and I was arguing against this I was able to be given high-level policy direction and be told that ministers had decided we would get intelligence from torture. The fact that ministers made that decision was the background to what was happening in Pakistan, for example. It is not that MI5 operatives were acting independently; they were pursuing a policy framework set ministerially.

Q79 Chairman: So, ministers specifically used the words “torture”, “evidence from the CIA” and “no questions: turn a blind eye”?

Mr Murray: Ministers certainly had before them and read my telegrams which said that this was torture and detailed the type of torture involved.

Q80 Chairman: What you just said was that ministers said it was okay to use torture?

Mr Murray: No; I think I said that ministers said it was okay to use intelligence from torture.

Q81 Chairman: Therefore, the inference is that it is not just turning a blind eye or “ask no questions, tell no lies”; it is specific knowledge?

Mr Murray: Nobody argued to me once that the Uzbek intelligence we were discussing did not come from torture; everyone accepted that it came from torture and the question was whether or not we accepted it. Nobody said that it was not actually torture.

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Mr Murray: That is a reasonable way to express it. The telegrams that I wrote at the end of 2002 and beginning of 2003 were expressed quite specifically in terms of my concern that British government ministers were acting illegally by receiving this material under UNCAT. My telegrams said that the secretary of state might be acting illegally by being in receipt of that material.

Q77 Dr Harris: Can you clarify why you think they described those telegrams as unwise? You do not quote but say that they reported in that conversation that such sensitive questions were best not discussed on paper.

Mr Murray: It is always difficult to answer why somebody said something. You can say what they said, but obviously I am not inside their minds.

Q78 Dr Harris: Did you ask why?

Mr Murray: I would like to put this to you: two telegrams were sent by a British ambassador stating that the secretary of state might be acting illegally. I did not receive any written answer to those two telegrams. It would be extremely unusual for a Foreign Office ambassador to write back on any serious policy problem and not receive any reply from the department. To send two telegrams which actually allege illegality by your own secretary of state and not get a written refutation is quite extraordinary. Instead, I was summoned to a meeting at which I was told that these things were better not put in writing. I was able to get the Sir