USUK made use of Uzbek torture
Former British ambassador, Craig Murray, says UK and USA sent prisoners to Uzbekistan to be tortured

Here Craig Murray describes the US ally, Uzbekistan, as a totalitarian dictatorship left over from the former Brezhnev, Soviet regime which holds over ten thousand political prisoners. "They still operate the old, Soviet gulags."

"Torture in Uzbekistan isn't unusual. It happens to several thousands of people every year ... The intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA and passed onto MI6 because MI6 and the CIA share all their intelligence."

"When people were being tortured they were being told to confess to membership of Al Qaeda. They were being told to confess to have been in training camps in Afghanistan and told to confess to have met Osama Bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes. They spoke of Uzbeks having been in Al Qaeda, in training camps and meeting Osama Bin Laden. In fact we were now in 2002-2003 when we didn't know where Osama Bin Laden was and the way he managed to see thousands of Uzbeks every year it would have been easier to track him down I felt!"

"It wasn't hard to put two and two together and work out the fact that every political prisoner I knew of in Uzbekistan was tortured and the fact that we knew of what they were being forced to confess under this torture and the CIA material came up with the same, rather dodgy narrative. It wasn't hard to put two and two together and realise that the intelligence material was coming from torture."

"Before I did anything I wanted to make sure I was on safe ground so I asked my deputy to go to the American Embassy and say to them, 'My ambassador is worried because he thinks your intelligence is coming from torture.' She came back and reported to me the reply from the CIA head in the station at Tashkent [which] was, 'Yes, of course it's coming from torture, We don't see that as a problem in the context of the war on terror.'"

"I did see that as a problem, particularly when I discovered that the CIA were bringing in people, flying in people to Uzbekistan and handing them over to the Uzbek security services ... I falsely presumed that these people they were bringing in and handing over to the security services were Uzbeks who had been captured elsewhere and brought back to Uzbekistan. I did not realise that they were of many other nationalities being handed over to be tortured."

"But they were being tortured, I knew, [but] that Uzbekistan was a destination for the extraordinary rendition system from all over the world I really didn't quite realise at the time. We now know, following for example the Council of Europe's investigation that 90% of the aeroplanes that stopped at the famous secret prison in Poland had Tashkent as their next destination."

"I complained back to London. I said we're getting this evidence from torture. It's illegal, it's immoral and it's unreliable. It's vastly exaggerating the strength of Al Qaeda in Central Asia ... I got called back to London and I expected there to have a sensible talk about the merits and demerits of intelligence and how much evidence I had that it was obtained under torture. I was absolutely stunned, genuinely stunned --it changed my whole world-view in an instant-- to be told that London knew that it was coming from torture, that it wasn't illegal because our legal advisers thought that under the United Nations' convention against torture it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn't do the torture ourselves."

Murray's first-hand evidence clearly illustrates how Blair and the British government were complicit in Bush's brutal, fake war on terror.



Craig Murray's Blog

Uzbek Terror and the USUK

Ex-ambassador Craig Murray exposes the horrific tortures taking place in Uzbekistan and the reasons why the USUK are secretly complicit in them.

"Anyone interested in hydrocarbon resources needs to be in Uzbekistan," he observes. He highlights two incidents of torture after which he began to realize that greatly exaggerated CIA intelligence reports were resulting from them. He reports that the CIA were flying in people to be tortured.

"I knew the CIA people who were doing it," he claims.

"When Bush came into power the relationship between the US and Uzbekistan became very cosy" Now Obama is planning to warm up the relationship and to beef up the Uzbek dictator, Karimov.

"To find out that respect for international law and human rights had gone out of the window and that people I knew and worked with were prepared to justify torture and that people knew we were using torture to beef up the terrorist scare ... when something like that hits you it really does plunge you into questioning everything you ever believed in."

Pipelineistan and the end of Empire

As the number of deaths of British service-people mounts and the British MSM focuses on the mounting mortality rates the BBC's Question Time was bound to discuss the topic. Normally, Question Time is so tightly controlled by David Dimbleby's team that there is very little likelihood that either the panel or the audience might express a view challenging the right-wing establishment status quo. The panel speakers themselves are carefully picked in a way where anyone resembling a leftie has little or no chance of getting on.

But it's difficult to control everyone all the time and more so a bolshy audience. And on the subject of Afghanistan, last Thursday night's audience was bordering on the bolshy. The celebrity Trisha Goddard surprised me with saying some sensible things about Afghanistan and even going so far as to conclude that it had become our Vietnam. The Libdems' Lembit Opik cut in saying that maybe we shouldn't have trained Osama Bin Laden in the first place to which Dimbelby could only reply "That's hindsight for you."

As usual, the discussion was initiated by a question from the audience about whether British forces should be given more helicopters in order to reduce road-side casualties. The essential question about what Britain is doing there in the first place was studiously avoided. Along with our rulers the British MSM takes it as a given what it has been told about the threat to British security from ghostly Al Qaeda terrorists who would take over Afghanistan if 'our brave heroes' weren't out there. The real, geostrategic reasons about the need to safeguard Pipelineistan's oil and gas in the interests of the multinationals (ie "western security") is taboo. For that the reader needs to look around carefully on the Internet for articles by William Engdahl and the like. Or read Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives.

The idea of hegemonizing the European Heartlands came first from Halford Mackinder and was adopted as a key strategy in British imperial foreign policy in the early 1900's. US historian Guido Giacomo Preparata, in his eye-opener of a book, Conjuring Hitler, illustrates how the British used the Heartlands geostrategic blueprint as a diplomatic weapon to draw Germany into two wars against the Anglo-Americans. Brzezinski went on to develop the blueprint for the inheritors of the British Empire, the USA, in its misnamed 'Pax Americana' and it is clearly a key aspect of the Neocons' Project for the New American Century, total world domination.

The Project (or PNAC) is what Bush II and his sidekick, Tony Blair, enthused about so much. And through understanding how the Bush II regime was so influenced by the Neocons we can see how 911 was used to justify an entirely fake 'War on Terrorism' and the subsequent occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq. To be explicit: the fake War on Terror was never more than a cover for Anglo-American ambitions for global domination through military force.

Neither the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan were wars in the sense of two roughly equal nations fighting each other. Instead they were invasions which led to the massacre of what now amounts to millions of civilians. These were never intended as wars to be won. Their purpose, as we can see now eight years later, is to be long-term military occupations intended to keep both countries tightly under the control of the US. That is why we are constantly told to expect a rise in the death toll of military personnel in an endless war.

You'll never hear this version of events spoken of on the MSM and for obvious reasons. The prospect of an endless list of mortalities in a war that goes on forever is intolerable and would not be accepted by any public. Instead, the MSM dons a fake face of concern that the problem is really about a lack of helicopters!

As a result of the long-term Anglo-American relationship, both British governments and the military find themselves in an unhealthy symbiosis with the Americans. Britain is no longer a global power but its rulers hang on desperately to an imperialist past. A series of incompetent British governments have found it all too easy to hang onto the 'special relationship' because of the supposed advantages that this brings to Britain at the international top table. Only with disasters like Iraq and Afghanistan does it become clear that far from any advantages to be had that both the British people and their rulers are having to pay a high price for what is in effect a one-sided relationship where when the Americans say 'Jump' the British have no choice but to jump.



British governments are terrified of upsetting their American bosses. Recently, on a BBC News 24 interview, Paul Rogers from the Bradford University Department of Peace Studies said as much. The live interview was not repeated in later BBC newscasts!

Significantly, on a recent Radio 4 interview, military chief Sir Richard Dannatt confirmed that fear:

"say what would happen if the United Kingdom was to leave this operation unilaterally or indeed if the coalition, if the alliance was to leave this operation. Then we would face, in the circumstances of the UK leaving, I think any relationship we have with the United States – special, interesting or otherwise, I think we would sever. I think we would severely prejudice the future structure and well-being, even existence of Nato. And if the coalition was to leave, or the alliance was to leave precipitately then I think we'd be handing an um enormous, um, propaganda information victory if you like to... well, how do we want to describe it? Al qaeda, islamist extremists, those who were behind the attacks that were manifested in 9-11 and perhaps even in the UK in.. in 7-7. So when we say we must succeed, we will succeed, actually the possibility of failure here is really unthinkable"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ljmmn/Today_17_07_2009/

It was a long time coming but now most accept that Britain has become a puppet of the Americans. More than any other leaders' it has been the servility of Blair and Brown that has brought this about. Why is it that when the vast majority of Brits opposed their government's occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan that British service-people continue to fight and die in those countries? Typically, serving the interests of a foreign power vastly eclipse the need to serve those of their people. Is this not treason?

It appears that the public continues to be at a loss to why we are in Afghanistan at all. A few, just a few, seem to have sniffed the rotting carcass of British imperialism beneath it. Instead the focus has been on an incompetent government that has let down its soldiers and we see British generals running to Downing Street with a shopping list of weaponry as if that is going to solve the dilemma.

The dilemma will never be solved outside of the total withdrawal of British forces. But even that would be only the first step, the second being a fundamental re-drawing of British foreign policy which looks to the reality of a multipolar world beyond the mirage of the neocons' desire for global domination.

Just as the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad marked the final folly of Hitler's attempt to dominate Eurasia it looks like Afghanistan will mark the end of the Anglo-American empires of evil.