Craig Murray
I just want to bookmark the website of Craig Murray, the morally gutsy former British Anmbassador in Uzbekistan who quit in 2004 in disgust over the Blair government's continued support for President Islam Karimov's extremely rights-abusing practices.
Since resigning, Craig has worked as a tireless activist to expose Karimov's use of torture and other abusive practices-- and also, the US and UK government's complicity in this.
On December 29, he posted a number of documents on his site that chart his and the FCO's knowledge of the reliance of the UK and US governments on "information" obtained from suspects by Karimov's thugs, using torture.
Craig Murray's courage and clearheaded moral thinking are an example to all.
Given the very much larger number of US diplomats and other government employees who know this kind of information about Karimov-- and much more, too, about him and about other thuggish "allies" in the "GWOT-- I am really sad that none of them has yet seen fit to follow her or his conscience to the extent that Craig has. (Though I recognize that some US government employees have resigned and "gone public" over other, non-torture aspects of the "GWOT".)
I know a lot's been written about Craig Murray elsewhere-- including in the MSM. But I needed to put a link in here, certainly.
Snap
I think U.S. diplomats are carefully screened before being hired so that such conscientous people may be filtered out. They give job applicants psychological tests, I believe. The ambassadorships are also used as political patronage jobs.
When I heard Craig Murray talking on the radio, he just seemed to me to be naive. The documents he publishes are nothing special, mainly a series of letters sent by him to London in protest at Uzbek behaviour, which anybody would agree is brutal.
Murray is by no means a specialist on Central Asia, he had a post of ambassador somewhere in Africa before, I seem to remember. I doubt if he could read any documents in Russian or Uzbek, if he got hold of any. The Brits have not invested much in their embassies in Central Asia, though Tashkent is probably the most important. They only opened a section in a joint European embassy in Almati because the Kazakhs insisted. (How much less for the Kyrgyz and the Turkmens). So probably any low-level ambassador figure would have been appointed.
I would think - from what I know of British diplomats, and I've known a good number of the "Arabists" - that they just found him an embarrassment. And they had to get rid of him in the end.
I wouldn't think the Foreign Office is particularly keen on information gained from torture. They know as well as anybody that torture leads to false information. It must certainly be in the British secret service manuals of how to react to torture to do precisely that: give false information in order to satisfy the interrogators.
The problem in Britain is not there, but rather what the politicians - that is particularly Blair - do with poorly sourced information. The supine attitude of Blair towards Washington. (Incidentally it is becoming evident that Blair is incompetent in the world of diplomacy. He was thoroughly beaten by Chirac in the latest round of negotiations on the European budget).
Anyway my take on the Central Asian regimes - such as the Uzbeks, but Kazakhstan is no different - is not that they are Stalinist, but that they go back to the regimes that existed before the Russian conquest. The Amirs of Bukhara used to have a pit (chah in Persian) which they threw unfortunates into and left for months on end. At least one British spy in the 19th century died that way.
Correction on one point: Murray did have experience of Eastern Europe, so maybe he does have some Russian. However Uzbekistan is not the same as Poland; the Russian aspects are superficial. though most westerners don't see the difference as they only read Russian.