"[As the British Ambassador in Uzbekistan.] At the same time that I was receiving word from Uzbek citizens about the gruesome affronts to their humanity, I was also getting CIA intelligence on Uzbekistan, under the U.S.-U.K. intelligence-sharing agreement. This information — fed to the CIA by Karimov's security services — revealed the same pattern of information as those forced confessions. And it was a pattern that was false, often demonstrably so. One piece of CIA intelligence named a Muslim terrorism suspect with alleged links to al-Qaeda, except I happened to know that the person in question was a Jehovah's Witness, not a Sunni Muslim extremist. Another gave a specific location for a terrorist training camp in the hills above Samarkand, a spot I knew was empty. The CIA was apparently well aware that it was getting material drawn from torture. At my request, my deputy confirmed this with the U.S. Embassy. She reported back to me that she had been told that the United States did not see a problem "in the context of the war on terror." (I immediately reported this back to Britain in a top-secret telegram.) And both the CIA and the British intelligence service, MI6, were accepting and using this intelligence in their assessments, despite its highly questionable validity."
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Activists from ScotlandHuman rights activistsJournalists from ScotlandAmbassadors of Great Britain and the United KingdomBloggers from England
Original Language: English
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"Her Majesty's Man in Tashkent" The Washington Post (3 September 2006)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Craig_Murray
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Craig Murray
(born 17 October 1958) is a Scottish former diplomat for the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office who was the ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004, a post from which he was removed. In later years, he has been known for his defence of Julian Assange, and for contentious claims published on his blog and X, formerly known as Twitter. He was the Workers Party of Britain candidate in Blackburn at the 2024 general election coming third with 18.3% of votes.
43 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Craig Murray →
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