AMY GOODMAN: Boiled to death?

CRAIG MURRAY: Yeah, it was one of the first cases I came across, back in August or September of 2002. Two Muslim prisoners in Jaslyk gulag, which is an old Soviet gulag in the middle of the Karakum Desert, a sort of forced-labor camp, a terrible place where people are sent to die, effectively, two Islamic prisoners were boiled to death. They died of immersion in boiling water. The mother of one of the prisoners received her son's body back in a sealed casket, was ordered not to open the casket, and just to bury it the next morning. Despite being in her sixties, she managed to get the casket open in the middle of the night, even though police were guarding the house outside.

She got the body onto the kitchen table and took a series of detailed photos, which she got to the British embassy. I sent them back to London -- or, in fact, to Scotland, to the University of Glasgow, the pathology department. On the basis of these detailed photos, they did an autopsy report, in which they said that he had had his fingernails extracted, he had been severely beaten, particularly about the face, and he died of immersion in boiling liquid. And it was immersion, rather than splashing, because there is a clear tide mark around the upper torso and arms, which gives you some idea of the level of brutality of this regime.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you got this information out, and then what happened?

CRAIG MURRAY: It was very difficult for the British government, which, officially, of course, supports human rights, so it was very hard for them to reprimand me for making points on human rights. But also, internally, I was making other points, which I wasn't making in public at that time, and that was about the intelligence material we were getting from the Uzbek secret service, because I was seeing C.I.A. reports, which were passed on to MI6, which had been extracted from the Uzbek torture chambers.

I had been there for two or three months, which was long enough to know that, effectively, any Uzbek political or religious detainee is going to be tortured. There's no question of definition here. You know, we're not talking about ‘Is that or is that not torture?’ We're talking about people having their fingernails pulled, having their teeth smashed with hammers, having their limbs broken, and being raped with objects, including broken bottles; both male and female rape, extremely common in Uzbek prisons. And from the security service, which was operating right alongside the C.I.A., we were getting this intelligence.

I mean, the intelligence itself was nonsense. The purpose of the intelligence was to say that all the Uzbek opposition were related to al-Qaeda, that the democratic Uzbek opposition were all Islamic terrorists, that they'd traveled to Afghanistan, held meetings with Osama bin Laden. It was designed to promote the myth that Uzbekistan was, in total, part of the war on terror, and that by aligning himself with Karimov, Bush and the Bush Administration were backing or improving United States security, which wasn't true at all. I mean, the intelligence was false. If you torture people, they will say anything. I couldn't believe that the C.I.A. was working so closely with these dreadful security services and then were accepting intelligence which was obviously untrue. When I started complaining about that, even though I was only complaining internally, that's when the British government started to lose its patience with me and get very angry with me.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did the British government do, and when did they do it?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, initially, I was summoned back to London for a meeting, which happened in March of 2003.

AMY GOODMAN: Right before the invasion.

CRAIG MURRAY: Just before the invasion. At that meeting, Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign Office’s chief legal advisor, said that it wasn't illegal for us to obtain this information that was got under torture, which he then confirmed in the follow-up memo, which is the memo which we’ve published on the web. He said that as long as we didn't specifically ask for an individual to be tortured, if he was tortured and we were passed the material, then that was not breaking the U.N. Convention Against Torture, and therefore the C.I.A. and MI6 were acting perfectly legally in getting this information from torture.

AMY GOODMAN: So you could know they were tortured, but you hadn't directly asked for their torture?

CRAIG MURRAY: Exactly. That made it not illegal, which is a line which, frankly, no international lawyer or not-in-government employee would take, but that was the view given. And I was told that this question had been considered at the highest level by the British Secretary of State, Jack Straw, who discussed it with the head of MI6, and they had decided that we should continue to receive this intelligence material, which was all C.I.A.-sourced, even though it was obtained through torture.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you have evidence of C.I.A. or other U.S. or British or other government officials in the torture chambers with the intelligence or prison officials in Uzbekistan torturing people?

CRAIG MURRAY: No, I don't think they ever did that, and I think they carefully avoided it. There is a fabric of deniability over the whole thing. They don't go actually into the torture chamber. They receive the intelligence that comes out of the torture chamber, but they don't enter it.

The C.I.A. will then process the material, so that when it actually arrives on the desk of Colin Powell, as it was then, or Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld, or on the desk of a British minister, it just says this intelligence was got from an Uzbek prisoner related to al-Qaeda. It doesn't say who he was. It doesn't say his name. It doesn’t say when he was interrogated. So you can't trace it back, in order to say it was that individual and he was tortured in this way.

We know that they were being tortured. As I say, the United Nations did an investigation in which they said that torture in Uzbekistan was widespread and systemic, but the information is sanitized carefully. So when it arrives on the desk of, let's say, Condoleezza Rice, all she sees is it says, you know, this came from a terrorist detainee in Uzbekistan. So she can say, “I, to my knowledge, have never seen information obtained under torture.” And that's a fabric of deceit set up to enable her to say that, in effect.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. He was fired from that position. He ultimately quit the British foreign service, was ambassador 2002 to 2004. So, you were there in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. You were there afterwards. How did the time change the U.S. and British relationship with Uzbekistan and Karimov?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, I should say that one thing, which completely astonished me, was, as we went into the Iraq war, I saw George Bush on CNN, making a speech the day the real fighting started, where he said we are going in basically to dismantle the torture chambers and the rape rooms. And yet, the United States was subsidizing the torture chambers and the rape rooms in Uzbekistan. The sheer hypocrisy of that led me to write another one of the telegrams, which we've published on the web.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you say in that telegram? And, by the way, we will also post all of these on our website at DemocracyNow.org.

CRAIG MURRAY: Effectively, I said just that: How could we pretend that we were going to war to bring democracy to Iraq or to support human rights, when, at the same time, one of our allies, one of the members of the “Coalition of the Willing,” was Uzbekistan, which is one of the worst regimes in the world and every bit as bad as Saddam Hussein’s regime? And that if Karimov was on our side, plainly, we weren’t the goodies. And so, I put that fairly bluntly, which again didn't go down too well with Tony Blair and his people, I understand.

AMY GOODMAN: When did they ultimately pull you out?

CRAIG MURRAY: Well, what happened next was I suddenly found in August of 2003 -- I was on holiday in Canada -- I was called back early from holiday and told they wanted me to resign as ambassador in Tashkent. They said that they would find me another job somewhere else. I could be ambassador somewhere peaceful, like Copenhagen or somewhere. And I said, “No, I'm not going to resign. Why should I resign?” You know, I'm arguing my case internally, as I should. I'm not leaving. So they then said, “Well, in that case, we're going to have to investigate these disciplinary allegations,” and they handed me a list of 18 allegations, which included stealing money, which included issuing visas in exchange for sex and various other quite extraordinary allegations, and then said they’d give me a week to consider whether I wanted to resign or not.

Of course, I didn't resign. I said that these are just totally untrue. But they then proceeded to leak the allegations to the media, in order to dent my credibility, in effect. I refused to go, and there was a full formal investigation, which cleared me of all the allegations. I was acquitted of them all. But they had already -- although they hadn’t succeeded in getting me to resign , which was the purpose of the allegations, they had, from their point of view, achieved something in tarnishing my name. But I fought the allegations.

I went back, I stayed another year, and then one of my confidential papers was leaked to the Financial Times back in October of 2004. And that wasn't I who leaked it, but it was the leak of that paper which was the excuse for sacking me. And I strongly suspect that they leaked it themselves, in order to give them an excuse to sack me, having failed to get rid of me any other way.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is it that was leaked?

CRAIG MURRAY: It was a complaint about our cooperation with the Uzbek government.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you say?

CRAIG MURRAY: I said, effectively, that Uzbekistan is morally beyond the pale, that we shouldn’t be treating it as an ally, and we certainly shouldn’t be cooperating with the Uzbek security services.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about Jamal Mirsaidov?

CRAIG MURRAY: Yes. Jamal Mirsaidov is a very brave man. He’s an old man, a professor of Tajik literature at the University of Samarkand, who was a dissident in Soviet times. I went and had dinner with him at the end of March 2003. While we were having dinner, his grandson, who lived in his house, was abducted off the streets, tortured, severely tortured, and murdered. His elbows and knees were smashed. His right hand was dipped in boiling liquid until the flesh peeled away. And, ultimately, he was killed with a blow to the back of the head.

I left after dinner with the professor, and a few hours, three, four hours after I left, the body was dumped on the professor's doorstep, and this was intended as a warning, both to the professor and to me, I mean, a warning not to meet dissidents and for dissidents not to meet me. It was -- the grandson was either 17 or 18 years old and, obviously, you know, that again gives an example of how dreadful the regime is. But also, it has troubled my own conscience greatly, because if I hadn't met his grandfather, he probably wouldn't have died that terrible death. So, it had a profound effect on me.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who has spoken out about the Uzbek regime, the U.S. relationship with that regime, and the financial support, as well as the British government's. When we come back, we will continue to talk about this and about his book that he has tried to publish about his experiences. The British government has stopped him from doing that, but hasn’t stopped him from posting on his website his confidential memos that he wrote to the British government after viewing U.S. and British intelligence coming out of Uzbekistan based on people who were tortured.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was there in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and afterwards, from 2002 to 2004. Finally, he was fired, and he ultimately quit the British foreign service. We are talking to Ambassador Craig Murray, who has just flown into the United States, speaking for the first time in the United States since he posted confidential memos online that he had written to the British government at the time, of course, privately, writing about the horrendous human rights record of the Uzbek regime and what it had to do with the British and U.S. governments. He is here to testify this weekend at an international commission of inquiry on crimes against humanity committed by the Bush administration, at an event at Riverside Church in New York City. And you can read more about that at BushCommission.org.

I wanted to talk about what happened last year in the eastern Uzbek town of Andijan. On May 10, protests began over the jailing of 23 businessmen who had been identified by the government as Islamic extremists. The protesters broke the men out of jail, and in the process freed thousands of other prisoners. By May 12, the protests intensified, and demonstrators tried to take over government buildings in Andijan. The Uzbek government responded by sealing off the city and then killing over 700 people. At the time, Uzbekistan was a key ally to both the United States and Britain in Central Asia. Initially, the U.S. downplayed the killings. On May 13, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was asked whether the United States blamed the violence on the government of Uzbekistan. This is how Boucher responded.