From thesharpner

In August 2002 Craig Murray set off to Uzbekistan as HM Ambassador. For those of us a bit vague about the aftermath of the USSR, it’s bordered by Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, Kazakhstan, and what’s left of the Aral Sea after the appalling ecological impact of its massive cotton industry. Alongside cotton it produces natural gas, vast amounts of minerals, and tobacco. It’s a country full of resounding place names, among them what were once called the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers and the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand.

Murray had not been an ambassador before but he had been a diplomat for some 20 years, including a spell as head of the economics section of the British Embassy in Warsaw and most recently as Deputy High Commissioner of Ghana. He did not come from the typical FCO background: a Scot, he went to a state school and Dundee University. His staff in Tashkent was tiny: few other western nations even had an embassy there at the time.

It will be no surprise to anyone who reads Murray’s site that his book is in part a sustained attack on UK foreign policy over the last few years. Murray soon began to come to the conclusion that Karimov’s regime in Uzbekistan were a brutal band of corrupt thugs, running a country where show-trials relying on ‘evidence’ obtained by torture were routine. The US and UK were backing the regime, in part as an element of the ‘War on Terror’, and pouring money into it, because it was opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, and because Uzbekistan is in a useful position for Rumsfeld’s ‘lily pad’ strategy (lots of permanent major US bases scattered over the middle east for rapid reaction), and also happen to be sitting on a lot of valuable natural resources and potential pipeline routes etc. He also argues that our Governments are, or at least were, labouring under a fundamental misapprehension: that Karimov’s regime is part and parcel with other Soviet successor regimes in eastern Europe: Walesa, Havel, and the like. It isn’t: Karimov and his ilk are the old local Communist leaders under new colours. These are men who were not at all impressed with Gorbachev.

Murray decided that one of the themes of his embassy would be standing up on human rights: in later correspondence with the FCO he was to write:

‘I think that outrage is absolutely the correct emotion at learning that someone has been tortured to death with boiling water. If your reaction at seeing photos of this is not to be outraged but to wonder precisely which UN Convention contains provision against torture by boiling water, then I am sorry. I see the head of ODIHR has called it in public ‘horrid’. I presume you think he is being a bit strong. [‘] PS I don’t know if you have noticed but I have a slight speech defect. I really can’t call anything ‘howwid’.’

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David Leigh on Craig Murray’s extraordinary account of his period as envoy to Uzbekistan, Murder in Samarkand

From The Guardian

There is plenty of black comedy in this frank story of the disillusionment and downfall of one of Britain’s brightest young ambassadors. It is presumably that element which has already attracted director Michael Winterbottom to his project of making it into a feature film with Steve Coogan in the title role.

Craig Murray clearly had little idea of what he was letting himself in for four years ago, when he set off with a pile of baggage on a first-class flight, as envoy to the faraway country of Uzbekistan. A bit of a bon vivant and a womaniser, he was also clever and industrious, and he knew it. One of a new unstuffy breed in the Foreign Office, from Dundee University rather than Oxford, he says he protested at being told to wear a grey tailcoat and topper for a duty call on the royals before departure. He was informed the dress code was sternly insisted on by the Palace, since an ambassador had recently committed the solecism of arriving in a linen suit. “Good God! A linen suit?” writes Murray cockily. “No wonder we lost the Empire!”

But when he got to Tashkent, Murray’s cockiness started to evaporate. As he describes it, he found himself in a milieu worthy of Graham Greene. The Americans were busy building an enormous airbase, and praising the sinister President Karimov to the skies as a reformist ally in the great war on terror. Karimov himself was exploiting US naivety while running an Asiatic tyranny on a North Korean model, with internal passports, virtual slave labour, and brutal torture of Muslim dissidents. The Americans were kept happy by a supply of colourful “intelligence” about al-Qaida activities, most of which, says Murray, was nonsense.

The new ambassador decided to attend a show trial. It was an eye-opener. He was at first intrigued by an encounter with an Uzbek lovely, and then became very ashamed of himself. “I realised this was the sister of the victim. Her eyes were filling with tears. Her brother was going to be executed and I was trying to make out her legs through her dress. I was filled with self-loathing.” He felt even more ashamed when he found his local girlfriends were resigned to being regularly raped by the thuggish Tashkent police.

Murray set about doing what he thought was the right thing. He decribes how he sent telegrams to London demanding diplomatic action. He confronted corrupt Uzbek officials. He made a dramatic public speech in front of a stony-faced US ambassador, contradicting bland American praise of the regime and becoming a local hero.

But, as he tells the story, there was just too much that Murray did not realise at the time. He did not know that Tony Blair and the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, had hitched Britain irrevocably to the White House wagon. He did not know that with the coming invasion of Iraq, any dissent from the architecture of lies used to justify it would be depicted as “unpatriotic”. He did not know that the CIA had a secret policy of “rendition” which was not merely condoning torture, but was deliberately exploiting it. And it is clear from his account that he did not realise his unhappy marriage and penchant for long-legged pole-dancers were capable of blowing up in his face.

Murray says he was briefed against by the Americans, who had the ear of No 10, and undermined by his own superiors in London. An initial attempt was made to force him to resign with false charges of alcoholism and corruption. The internal memos about this which Murray eventually obtained are quite disgusting to read, even in the heavily censored form allowed by HMG’s lawyers.

Murray temporarily collapsed under the strain, and it is not inconceivable from the evidence here that his Uzbek enemies made an attempt to poison him. He seems to have fought bravely, rescued his reputation and eventually forced the FO to pay him off, which financed his divorce. Murray does demonstrate that the men of straw have failed to silence him, for which he deserves much praise. But he has none the less been successfully defenestrated. He is now living with the young Uzbek beauty whom he fell for, and is reduced to a flat in west London. Those he took on – Karimov, Bush and Blair – remain in power.

Justin Marozzi reviews Murder in Samarkand in The Spectator

Craig Murray, formerly Our Man in Tashkent, was not your average ambassador. He put the wind up the Uzbeks with his uncompromising position on President Islam Karimov’s unspeakably grisly human rights record. This is the country that infamously boiled a dissident to death and then sentenced his mother to six years of hard labour when she had the temerity to complain about it. It is thanks to Murray’s efforts that the case was publicly aired in the first place and that the unfortunate mother’s sentence was subsequently commuted to a fine.

Upsetting Uzbekistan is one thing. The problem was that all this business was going on from 2002-4, when Washington, historically a little careless about choosing its friends around the world, was cosying up to one of its nastiest regimes. Karimov was a new-found ally in President Bush’s war on terror, providing an important airbase from which the Taleban regime in Afghanistan was defeated. Washington wasn’t happy about Britain’s man in Uzbekistan ruffling feathers. So he had to go. Britain, having mislaid its independent foreign policy, shamefully did America’s bidding.

Click to access the full article at The Spectator

From Literary Review, August 2006

Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror

Put aside the clunky subtitle and the garland from moral pimple John Pilger ‘ the anti-Establishment Antipodean’s a hero until you meet him ‘ and what you have here is an amazing narrative, beautifully written, of one man’s war on the War on Terror.

Craig Murray was the youngest British ambassador when he was appointed to represent Her Majesty in the Central Asian tyranny of Uzbekistan. Brilliant, unorthodox, committed to championing the causes of the United Kingdom, free trade and human rights, Murray had served his country with aplomb in Poland, Ghana and in the Citadel in Whitehall, playing real-life, real-time war games against Saddam’s arms-procurement network after the invasion of Kuwait. But the rising star sizzled up like an overdone sausage when he came up against the War on Terror.

The fascination of Craig Murray’s tale of his fall from grace at the hands of the Foreign Office is that he gives so much ammunition to his enemies. He freely admits that he does hang out in dodgy bars, he does drink, he does fall in love with an Uzbek dancer (and English graduate) half his age, he does leave his (long-suffering and admirable) wife and he does have a nervous breakdown. Murray was cared for in St Thomas’s in London:

‘For the next ten days, I was on suicide watch. This involved a burly male nurse watching my every move 24 hours a day, and even following me into the loo. I can promise you, if you are not suicidal before, you will be after ten days of having a large male nurse follow you into the loo.’

But it is the honesty with which Murray reports his predicament that is striking. I do not think that he holds anything back from the reader, and that makes his indictment of the Foreign Office mandarins and then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw all the more compelling. He is an honest man, and that seems to have been his difficulty.

The core of the story is that Murray found President Karimov’s Uzbekistan a disgusting dictatorship where the government runs the heroin trade, business is a personal fiefdom of the ruler’s cronies and dissidents are boiled alive. His problem was that his honest reporting of the situation did not square with how Washington wanted to see it. The script from the White House was that Karimov was onside in the War on Terror, was fighting Muslim extremists and associates of Bin Laden, and was making significant moves towards democracy.

And Britain? The cornerstone of the Atlantic relationship is the USA’UK intelligence-sharing agreement, in which the CIA and the National Security Agency share everything (or nearly everything) with MI6 and GCHQ. The Americans pump out four or five times as much data as the Brits do, so it is a relationship from which we benefit. The problem with any intelligence system is ‘garbage in, garbage out’. If the Americans are told by the Uzbek SNB (the local, rebranded KGB) that an Al Qaeda cell is running in, say, the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan, then that is reported as fact by the CIA. But Murray went to the bother of attending some of the regime’s show trials. At one, he hears an elderly farmer cry out, denying his testimony that his grandson had travelled to Afghanistan and had met Bin Laden:

”They tortured me!’ said the old man.

‘They tortured my grandson before my eyes. They beat his testicles and put electrodes on his body. They put a mask on him to stop breathing. They raped him with a bottle. Then they brought my granddaughter and said they would rape her. All the time they said ‘Osama Bin Laden, Osama Bin Laden’. We are poor farmers from Andijan. We are good Muslims, but what do we know of Osama Bin Laden?”

Game over. It was this trial, and a mountain of other compelling evidence that led Murray to question the fundamental propositions behind the War on Terror. Murray’s first broadside came in his speech to the Freedom House in 2002 when he corrected the American ambassador’s drivel and said: ‘Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy. The major political parties are banned; parliament is not subject to democratic election; and checks and balances on the authority of the executive are lacking”.

Murray realised that secret intelligence from Uzbekistan ‘ fed to the CIA, and passed on to MI6 and then to him ‘ was based on torture. He put it succinctly in one telegram to Jack Straw: ‘We are selling our souls for dross.’

Murray was rewarded with total disgrace. He was charged with eighteen counts of gross professional misconduct, including having sold visas for sex, alcoholism, having used the flag car as a fun vehicle, blah, blah, blah. Back in Whitehall, Murray accused his Foreign Office superiors, Simon Butt and Linda Duffield, of doing their utmost to undermine his position with the torturers. Part of me has never been able to understand Appeasement, how the British Establishment could have bent so low. Having read Murray’s story, I can now. Even so, it is a shocking read, to see how often the Foreign Office twisted facts and invented half-truths to do Murray down. Fascinatingly, no one outside bought a word of it.

The lie factory in King Charles Street was almost universally disbelieved. Virtually the entire British business community in Uzbekistan had seen for themselves just how hard Murray had worked at understanding their problems. They’d seen, too, how the Uzbek leadership treated lickspittles with contempt, and how the moment Murray started standing up for the UK and human rights, the authorities had begun to treat the British with more respect. The business community ‘ from the tobacco company to the lowliest consultant ‘ sent Jack Straw fax after fax, setting him straight.

The hacks did Murray proud, too. Fleet Street’s finest rushed off to Uzbekistan and trawled the girly bars. Yes, the ambassador did some drinking. Yes, he had one woman, Nadira (who now lives with him). But all the other allegations were false. Instead, the hacks got the real story: that torture and repression were routine, and that Murray was in trouble for telling it straight. Some of the most fascinating bits of this book concern how Murray, the insider, used Foreign Office procedure against the FO itself.

But, in the end, he was forced out, and what Murray claims were the big lies ‘ for example, that the British government opposes torture in intelligence-gathering ‘ were able to settle down, no longer challenged from within. The latest twist in the story is that the Treasury’s solicitors have been on to Murray, and his publishers, calling on them to pull sensitive telegrams from his website. They may succeed, for a limited while.

But truth will out. Craig Murray is at pains ‘ sometimes absurdly so ‘to demonstrate that he is no hero. But that doesn’t stop him from being heroic, or his book from being a bloody good read.

By Daniel Bardsley in GulfNews.com

Dubai: A rebellious former British Ambassador has described his country’s foreign policy as “appalling” and predicted it will lead to more terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom.

Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, called on Britain to align itself with Europe rather than the United States, saying Tony Blair was “completely out of step”.

Murray, 47, was removed from his post in 2004 after criticising the West’s support for Islam Karimov, the Uzbek leader accused of human rights abuses, among them the boiling alive of dissidents. His recent memoir of his time in Uzbekistan, Murder in Samarkand, has hit bookstores in the UAE and is being reprinted following strong demand.

In a telephone interview with Gulf News from London, Murray said: “Britain should return to being in line with European policy. European policy in the Middle East was respected. We’ve lost that respect.

“With Lebanon, it’s so obvious that it’s only the UK and the US standing in the way of an immediate ceasefire. The idea that we should prevent a ceasefire and allow the Israelis to kill as many Lebanese as possible is appalling.

“The government is completely out of step and sadly it will lead to a lot more terrorist attacks in the UK.

“We should coordinate our foreign policy with France and Germany and distance ourselves from the US.”

Murray had postings in Lagos and Warsaw before becoming Ambassador to Uzbekistan when still in his mid 40s. Within weeks of starting his job he decided that the regime was riding roughshod over human rights.

He said a trial of dissidents accused of killing a policeman and being members of an Islamic organisation was like “a Nazi show trial”. “The judge kept shouting and screaming at the defendants and making anti-Islamic remarks. It was really nasty.

“Within 24 hours I received photos of dissidents boiled to death. That was a hell of an eye opener,” he said.

Murray criticised the Uzbek regime in public and to his employers, and a string of disciplinary charges he described as “trumped up” were levelled against him.

He was cleared of the charges, which ranged from sexual misconduct to misuse of an embassy vehicle, but removed from his post after saying that British intelligence officials used information gained by the Uzbek authorities through torture. He resigned from the foreign office, which he said “destroyed my career”.

Later, he hopes to work promoting development in Africa. “I knew [the book] would be controversial. A lot of what it says is stuff the British Government really wouldn’t want to get out. That’s caused a lot of international interest,” he said, adding that a film version is planned, with Steve Coogan playing Murray and Michael Winterbottom directing.

By Jill Lawless in The Moscow Times

LONDON – Craig Murray says he’s an accidental ambassador. His allies consider him a hero. His opponents say he’s a disaster.

Britain’s former top diplomat in Uzbekistan, Murray was removed from his post in 2004 after accusing the government of torture and of holding thousands of political and religious prisoners.

His comments won him praise from human rights groups, ordinary Uzbeks – and, he says, many other diplomats. But within months the self-confessed whisky-loving womanizer was accused of mismanagement and sexual misconduct, saw his private life splashed across the tabloid press, was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown and finally was removed from his post.

Murray is unrepentant about his highly undiplomatic behavior. To the British government’s chagrin, he has published a book, “Murder in Samarkand,” recounting the whole grisly affair.

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Proving you can be a chinless wonder and an unpleasant bastard at the same time.

One of the points I make in “Murder in Samarkand” is that part of the antagonism towards me in the FCO was class based – I went entirely to state schools.

The FCO were quoted on Radio 4 on 28 July as saying that I was peddling an old-fashioned stereotype, no longer true.

Here is the board of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2004, the year I was sacked as Ambassador. Several of this bunch appear frequently in “Murder in Samarkand”.

Every single member of the board went to private school. (Despite the name, Leeds Grammar is a private school). Which explains a huge amount – including how they can look down their noses at dead children, and think “we must buy Israel more time to complete this.”

Craig

Mr. McNamara: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs who the members of the Departmental Board are, broken down by (a) gender, (b) race or ethnicity, (c) whether they attended public or independent school and (d) whether they attended Oxford University or Cambridge University; and how long each has been in post. [172117]

Mr. Straw: The Data Protection Act prevents us from providing information about the ethnicity or race of individuals. The members of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Board, and the background information requested, as published in Who’s Who, is as follows:

Sir Michael Jay’Sir Michael has been in his current post for two years. He was educated at Oxford and London Universities, and Winchester College.

Sir Stephen Brown’Sir Stephen has been in his current post for two years. He was educated at Sussex University, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Leeds Grammar School.

John Sawers’ John Sawers has been in his current post for one year. He was educated at Nottingham University, and Beechen Cliff School, Bath.

Kim Darroch’Kim Darroch has been in his current post for one year. He was educated at Durham University, and Abingdon School.

Martin Donnelly’Martin Donnelly has been in his current post for two months. He was educated at Oxford University and Saint Ignatius College.

William Ehrman’William Ehrman has been in his current post for two years. He was educated at Cambridge University, and Eton.

Richard Stagg’Richard Stagg has been in his current post for one year. He was educated at Oxford University, and Winchester College.

David Warren’David Warren has been in his current post for three months. He was educated at Oxford University, and Epsom College.

Simon Fraser’Simon Fraser has been in his current post for two years. He was educated at Cambridge University, and St. Paul’s School.

Simon Gass’Simon Gass has been in his current post for three years. He was educated at Reading University, and Eltham College.

The Sunday Post interviewed Craig and published the following review of Murder in Samarkand on the 16th July. Click here to open or download file the PDF file

It is probably your patriotic duty not to buy it.

By Philip Challinor in The Curmudgeon

It begins with an expression of amazement by a member of the British embassy staff in Uzbekistan. The source of his amazement is the fact that the British ambassador to Uzbekistan has any interest in what might be happening in that part of Uzbekistan which lies outside the gates of his residence. Craig Murray’s predecessors, and presumably successors, displayed no such interest.

As Murray discovered to his cost, this was not incompetence or negligence on their part. Uzbekistan, under the dissident-boiling regime of Islam Karimov, was a designated vital ally in the War Against the Abstract Noun and therefore an automatic recipient of the Bush administration’s seal of approval as a burgeoning democracy. Accordingly, it was the British ambassador’s patriotic duty to sit on his hands, make appropriate noises at social functions, and congratulate the regime on its nonexistent reforms while Karimov’s goons raped as many people and pulled out as many fingernails as they dashed well pleased.

Although a promising diplomat with experience in Nigeria, Ghana and Poland, Murray was unpatriotic enough to allow his personal distaste for torture and totalitarianism to get in the way of his professional judgement. The Foreign Office offered him the gentleman’s way out: a chance to resign rather than be kicked out on charges so incompetently fabricated they were an insult to the craft of trumping-up. Murray compares it to the good old-fashioned Britishness of being given a revolver and expected to do the decent thing; instead of which “I picked it up and started shooting at the bastards”. Truly, our values are not what they once were.

Starting with his witnessing of a dissident “trial”, which was largely a platform for the judge to make bad jokes about Muslims before passing sentence, Murray recounts his professional and personal adventures and vicissitudes from his arrival in Tashkent to his formal suspension from duty and resignation from the diplomatic service. It is clear that he made thoroughly unscrupulous use of his ambassadorial status not only to promote British commercial and cultural interests in Uzbekistan, but also to investigate human rights abuses and even, in one instance, to encourage asylum seekers to apply to the United Kingdom for accommodation. It is heartening to report that, for a change, they were turned down quickly enough to spare the taxpayer both the expense of deporting them and the tedium of reading about them in the Daily Mail.

Naturally, the Foreign Office did all it could to rein in Murray’s excesses. Their efforts to keep him from making a fool of himself led naturally to the ruin of his health, both physical and mental; and naturally, having nothing to hide, the Government has censored his book, delayed its publication and done its best to suppress the correspondence (released under the Freedom of Information Act) which substantiates Murray’s claims. Fortunately, these documents have been mirrored elsewhere, so it is still possible to gain some idea of the Government’s honesty, innocence and pristine attachment to principle.

Like many enemies of truth and decency, Murray exerts a certain dangerous charm. Despite the often harrowing subject matter, his book is always readable, never boring and sometimes hilarious. It is probably your patriotic duty not to buy it; and you certainly will not sleep better if you believe it, even though it does include a tip on how best to drink vodka with the KGB. Doubtless this is why the Government has done so much to protect us from it.

On Tuesday Craig was interviewed on BBC Today on the issue of crown copyright and the publication of civil servant memoirs. It is now available via Blairwatch.

Click here to listen

REVIEWED BY MAX HASTINGS in the The Sunday Times

It is a horrible story, and rings horribly true. Murray’s testimony forms another piece in the Iraq-WMD-Bush-war-on-terror-Afghanistan jigsaw of shame. It helps explain the moral bankruptcy to which the Blair government has reduced itself.

MURDER IN SAMARKAND: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror

by Craig Murray

Craig Murray is a former British ambassador to the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. To get the flavour of his astonishing career there from 2002-04, consider some of the headings under his name in this book’s index: ‘accusations against; bugging suspicions; sacking; Tashkent, asked to leave; topless bathers; visas for sex allegations; marriage, end of’. Lest anyone still fears this is a humdrum diplomatic memoir, here is Murray’ s account of his first meeting with a teenage belly dancer in a Tashkent niterie: ‘I astonished her by saying that I wanted her to give up the club and be my mistress. I explained that I could not marry her, as I was married, but I would keep her. I gave her my card and urged her to phone me.’

Phew. If this was Foreign Office life in the 21st century, candidates would be breaking down doors to join the party. Only it is not, of course. Murray, a kilted philanderer of heroic recklessness, proved an embarrassment to his masters from the day of his appointment, and ended up parting brass rags with them in a welter of mental breakdowns, publicity, divorce and mutual recriminations that he recounts with masochistic frankness.

‘So much for your dolly-bird secretary,’ he records his wife remarking, in a characteristic marital conversation after a less-than-successful embassy dinner. ‘Even if you aren’t screwing her, everybody thinks you are, and that suits you and your bloody ego!’

The pity of all this soap-opera stuff is that it cripples Murray’s purpose in writing his book: to expose the ghastly conduct of the Uzbek dictatorship and Anglo-American collusion with it. From the day Murray arrived in Tashkent in 2002, aged 43, he was appalled to discover that the regime of President Islam Karimov subsisted on a diet of mass murder, torture and slavery. He not only reported in detail to London, he also began to make speeches about human-rights abuse. His outspoken behaviour earned applause from the western media, oppressed Uzbeks and a few diplomatic colleagues, together with fury from the American ambassador and the Foreign Office.

George Bush and Tony Blair were preparing to invade Iraq. The Uzbek government was among their few Asian supporters. Washington was profoundly grateful to Karimov for granting the Americans basing rights in his country, as well as supporting Bush’s idiotic ‘war on terror’, which provided useful cover for Karimov’s persecution of dissidents.

American politicians and diplomats justified cash handouts to Karimov by asserting that Uzbekistan was moving towards democracy; that its human-rights record was improving. Murray encountered daily proof that this view was a travesty. The title of his book refers to an episode when, with his Foreign Office superior, he visited a prominent dissident. Within hours of their departure the man’s grandson was murdered, almost certainly by government agents. Murray was certain that this was retribution for meeting the British.

Yet the FCO refused to make a fuss. Pressure on Murray from Whitehall mounted, as he became passionately critical of the relationship between Whitehall secret services and the Uzbeks, who routinely tortured people to death to gain information. At one point, Murray attended a meeting in London at which a senior Foreign Office lawyer sought to soothe the ambassador, assuring him that there was no legal barrier to the British government’s use of evidence gained by torture in its campaign against terrorism.

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New Labour are not as stupid as they seem. I have now had a chance to take legal advice, and that advice is as follows. To defend this case would cost the price of a London house. I don’t have a house, in London or anywhere else. I am therefore obliged to give in to force majeure and remove some of the documents from my own site. This reeking government is therefore able to mask its stink on this particular miniscule corner of the internet.

Here is another piece of legal advice I received. Copyright cases cover one instance of publication in one place. Anyone else who has published any government documents that might be Crown Copyright, or not, (and I believe there are hundreds of thousands of documents on the web on which the government could, by the argument in Mr Buttrill’s letter, claim copyright), is an individual case and can wait to hear from Mr Buttrill.

Force Majeure wields a two-edged sword.

Craig

From: craig

To: Gareth Buttrill

Sent: Friday, July 07, 2006 2:56 PM

Subject: Re: Infringement of Crown Copyright: letter before claim

Mr Buttrill,

As no court has ruled on anything, I would like to know by what power you, acting for the government, can tell me what I “must” do in this respect. I am putting that question formally to you as a government servant and it is not rhetorical; I require an answer.

I find the increasing authoritatianism of government in this country deeply disturbing. I will consider carefully your points once I can get proper legal advice, and not before. It should not take too long.

I am now late for collecting my duaghter.

The PDF file of the full letter can be read or downloaded from here

Update: As it turns out, an increasing number of sites seem to have been hosting the same documents already. Some links to these other sites have been assembled here.

Murder in Samarkand has finally been released after ten months in legal limbo. Amazon are posting it out today. Bookshops are still a bit wary of taking it into stock as we wait to see if the FCO carries out its threat to take legal action once published.

Craig Murray’s book, ‘Murder In Samarkand’ has now been printed and review copies go out to the press early next week. The official documents, memos, and telegrams that provide the supporting evidence and background for the book can now be accessed from here…

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/documents/docs.html

The New Statesman on Murder in Samarkand

Jack “the Lad” Straw and ex-ambassador turned general-election rival Craig Murray are in a “who’ll blink first” stand-off. The Foreign Secretary refuses to clear Murray’s weighty 160,000-word memoirs for publication; our ex-man in Uzbekistan offers the book for sale from June on Amazon. Murray threatens to lift the lid on UK support for torture and rendition. Jack the Lad, it seems, is putting Murray through his own torture.

Online Collection of Supporting Documents

Synopsis

Craig Murray was the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to Uzbekistan until he was removed from his post in October 2004 after exposing appalling human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of President Islam Karimov. In this candid and at times shocking memoir, he lays bare the dark and dirty underside of the War on Terror. In Uzbekistan, the land of Alexander the Great and Tamburlaine, lurks one of the most hideous tyrannies on earth – one founded on cotton slavery and brutal torture. As neighbouring ‘liberated’ Afghanistan produces record levels of heroin, the Uzbek rulers cash in on massive trafficking. They are even involved in trafficking their own women to prostitution in the West. But this did not prevent Karimov being viewed as a key US ally in the War on Terror. When Craig Murray arrived in Uzbekistan, he was a young Ambassador with a brilliant career and a taste for whisky and women. But after hearing accounts of dissident prisoners being boiled to death and innocent people being raped and murdered by agents of the state, he started to question both his role and that of his country in so-called ‘democratising’ states. When Murray decided to go public with his shocking findings, Washington and 10 Downing Street reached the conclusion that he had to go. But Uzbekistan had changed the high-living diplomat and there was no way he was going to go quietly.

Synopsis

On December 28th 2000, Charlotte Wilson, a 27-year-old VSO worker, was killed when her bus, the inauspiciously named Titanic Express, was ambushed in war-torn Burundi. The attackers were members of the Hutu-extremist FNL, a faction linked to those responsible for the Rwandan genocide. Twenty others died with Charlotte, including her Burundian fiance. One of the few survivors was given a chilling message for the Burundian government: “We’re going to kill them all and there’s nothing you can do”. In “Titanic Express”, Charlotte’s brother Richard charts his painful struggle to unravel what happened that day, to understand the complex and brutal history that lay behind it. Cutting through the obfuscations of the authorities, he uncovers a story of violence, fanaticism and neglect that exposes the self-interest and double standards at the heart of our supposed commitment to human rights and the fight against terror. As the facts begin to emerge, the family’s deep personal grief is compounded by the realisation that this murder is just one among thousands, in a war fuelled as much by western cynicism and African greed as by ethnic divisions. “Titanic Express” is a political detective story, a memoir of grief and a moving portrait of an extraordinary woman who died at the very moment she had found fulfilment. In gripping detail it shows the human reality of lives torn apart by the machinations of war and diplomatic expediency, where competing versions of the truth can be as deadly as bullets and machetes.

Synopsis

International lawyer Philippe Sands has a unique insider’s view of the elites who govern our lives. His sensational revelations in Lawless World changed the political agenda overnight, forcing Tony Blair to publish damning material that he’d tried to hide. Now, in this updated edition with a shocking new chapter, you can get the full story of how the US and UK governments are riding roughshod over international agreements on human rights, war, torture and the environment – the very laws they put in place. Here sands looks at why global rules matter for all of us. And he powerfully makes the case for preserving them …before justice becomes history.

Synopsis

The Caspian Region, lying south of Russia, west of China and north of Afghanistan, contains the world’s largest untapped oil and gas resources. As much as 100 billion barrels of crude oil and 40 per cent of the world’s global gas reserves can be found in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Since the fall of communism, politicians and multi-national companies have struggled to possess and develop these resources.

In his penetrating new book, Lutz Kleveman reveals that there is a new ‘Great Game’ being played out in the region, a modern variant of the nineteenth-century clash of imperial ambitions between Britain and Russia, but with higher stakes. Desperate to wean itself from dependence on the OPEC cartel, the United States is now pitted in a struggle with Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran ‘ most of which are nuclear powers ‘ for dominance of the Caspian’s fabulous energy reserves and its pipeline routes.

Lutz Kleveman researched and travelled extensively in the Caucasus, the Caspian and Central Asia, meeting with oil barons, generals, diplomats and warlords from Kabul to Moscow. The New Great Game is a revelatory and extremely timely account of the perilous game to dominate the crucial resources ‘ one that mixes religion and oil to explosive effect.

From Scotland’s best traditional music outfit.

Includes the original track ‘Ambassador Craig Murray’s Reel’.

Synopsis

In one breathtaking, breathless volume Fitzroy Maclean tells of his career as diplomat and soldier from 1937-45.

The first part of the book deals with his diplomatic career in the USSR. Maclean quickly tires of the endless cycle of diplomatic receptions and the restrictions upon travel, and decides to see more of the USSR, particularly the Central Asian republics that were still being assimilated into the Union. He sets off on a series of enlightening journeys (with little or no official approval!) that take him far from Moscow to the legendary cities of Samarkand and Bokhara. This is fine travel writing indeed, Maclean giving a very powerful sense of what the Stalinist era was like and also of the exoticism of Central Asia. There are also powerful descriptions of the Stalist purges of 1938 and the accompanying “show trials”.

The second part of the book covers Maclean’s exploits with the SAS in the North African deserts and the Middle East. Resigning from his diplomatic post to join the Army (using the convenient excuse of becoming an MP!) Maclean serves as a private in a Scottish regiment for some time before being commmissioned and sent to the Middle East. Here he falls in with David Stirling and becomes an early member of the SAS – his stories of their training, tactics and raids are powerful indeed, matched by evocative descriptions of the African landscapes. Maclean moves on to form SAS units in the Middle East, but before long is summoned to go behind enemy lines as Churchill’s military representative to Tito’s Yugoslav partisans.

The final third of the book mixes military action and politics, with Maclean organising the support for the Partisans and representing them to the Allies. The political agenda here is a little blurred – Maclean is obviously a Conservative who has instinctive support for the return of the Yugoslav monarchy, and yet he admires Tito for what he has achieved in the liberation of his own country, while still maintaining a personal anti-Communist agenda… This section of the book makes the sheer scale of the Partisan operations very apparent, and hints at the confusion between the Western allies over the future fate of Yugoslavia.

This is a splendidly readable book, full of incident and description, with vividly drawn characters. It is told with occasional gentle humour, modesty, and genuine insight.

Maclean’s adventures arguably span the end of the “Great Game” – political influence won by adventurers – and the beginning of the Cold War, and his memoirs of this historical crossroads are thought-provoking and highly entertaining.

Synopsis

Fisk’s first hand accounts of (in particular) the Iran-Iraq conflict, Operation Desert Storm, his meetings with Bin Laden, Lebanon, the gruelling iniquities of life in the occupied territories, the idiocy of the Bush administration and its arrogant and misguided lapdogs in Downing Street, the effects of depleted uranium weapons ‘ to name just a few — are all fabulous bits of journalism placed within a sound historical context.

Synopsis

‘one of the best books about secret intelligence work ever written’ – Peter Hopkirk.

Colonel F. M. Bailey, whose extraordinary adventures are told here, was long accused by Moscow of being a British master-spy sent in 1918 to overthrow the Bolsheviks in Central Asia. As a result, he enjoyed many years after his death an almost legendary reputation there – that of half-hero, half-villain. In this remarkable book he tells of the perilous game of cat-and-mouse, lasting sixteen months, which he played with the Bolshevik secret police, the dreaded Cheka. At one point, using a false identity, he actually joined the ranks of the latter, who unsuspectingly sent him to Bokhara to arrest himself. Told with almost breathtaking understatement, Bailey’s narrative – set in a region once more back in the headlines – reads like vintage Buchan.

Review By Craig Murray

I would argue this is the World’s most unjustly neglected book. One of the greatest books of political analysis ever written, unjustly neglected. Heavily plagiarised by Lenin, the work still cited as the best evidence of Lenin’s intellectual credentials was in fact Hobson’s, a British Liberal in the tradition of Cobden and Bright.

Hobson argued that an Empire impoverishes the ordinary citizens of the Imperial nation, while funnelling money to small governing elites and what we would now call the military-industrial complex. His profound insight is backed by the statistical analysis of the first class economist that Hobson was.

Of course, this analysis is still valid today as the US taxpayer has spent, so far, $350 billion on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, while Exxon, Halliburton and the like make profits in unimaginable sums.

I have often been asked why I gave up a brilliant and highly rewarding career to fight the new imperialism. Partly it was simply that no decent human being could go along with the things I saw. And partly it was because I understood the processes I was witnessing. In very large part, I understood those processes because, as a young man, I had read Hobson. He really ought to be required reading for anyone who wishes to take a view on what is behind the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the next one, be it Iran or elsewhere.

Craig

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office seem determined to stop me publishing my book. They are threatening four grounds of legal action:

a) Libel

b) Crown Copyright

c) Breach of Confidence

d) Official Secrets Act

The first point is that plainly this is an attempt to suppress the book and prevent publication by scaring me (and the publishers) with the threat of legal action. This will not work, as neither of us scare easily.

Let us then consider each of these proposed legal actions in turn ‘

Libel

I am confident that the book is entirely true, and thus does not libel anybody. The FCO is likely nonetheless to try to run a vexatious libel action by one of its staff named in the book. The book cannot be sold in the UK during such action, and this is the most likely way they will attempt to in effect ban the book by using millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in an endless court process

Crown Copyright

Following the publication of Christopher Meyer’s book, Jack Straw said that in future the government would actively consider the use of Crown copyright to prevent such further publications. This is a stretching of the copyright law, and the argument goes like this:

When I was in Uzbekistan, I was employed by the Crown, so the intellectual property in anything I learnt belongs to the Crown, just as the copyright of anything created by a Microsoft software designer belongs to Microsoft.

There are three problems in this. First, I don’t think my contract said any of that, while I bet the Microsoft contract does.

The second problem is that they are claiming by book is untrue and inaccurate. They are lying, but that is their claim. If they want to maintain that claim, how can they possibly argues that the Crown has copyright over things which are fictitious and did not happen while I was in their employ? The notion is absurd.

The third problem is much more fundamental. If this applies to me, it would also apply to every other employee of the crown, including not just Christopher Meyer but also, for example, Tony Blair. Now we know that Tony Blair has obtained a huge mortgage on a house based on a guaranteed advance for his memoirs of his time as Prime Minister. Now under the government’s new argument, Blair has sold something that didn’t belong to him at all, but belonged to the Crown.

The FCO will argue that it is for the Crown Prerogative to decide when to exercise Crown Copyright and when to let it go. In other words, they would sue me and not Tony Blair. And who exercises the Crown Prerogative? Why, the Prime Minister, of course.

So let us be clear about this. By delving about in the most remote and arcane backwaters of Britain’s unwritten constitution, the government is seeking to undermine freedom of speech and claim the power arbitrarily to ban books. If this argument were accepted by the courts, the government could ban books under Crown Prerogative without having to give any explanation or reason as to why they decided to ban a ‘Dissident’ book but allow their own propaganda.

It is essential to fight this completely undemocratic development.

Breach of Confidence

The FCO attempted to frame me with false disciplinary allegations, and leaked the details of those allegations to the press. Plainly they had broken the relationship of confidence between us. Furthermore I believe I am revealing illegal action by the government, breaking both international and domestic law by being complicit in torture.

In these circumstances a ‘whistleblower’ is protected from this kind of legal harassment. There is no way that the government would win this before the European Court.

Official Secrets Act

This is, of course, the ultimate attempt to scare us by threatening prison against free speech. The large majority of official documents quoted in this book were released to me under the Data Protection Act. There are no other official documents which have not already been released all over the web. I am confident this is bluster ‘ to ask a jury to convict someone for revealing government malpractice is not sensible, and I would love to see Jack Straw in that witness box.

This is an important fight. We have a government committed to illegal war abroad and an attack across the whole spectrum of civil liberties at home. After banning books comes burning books. If at some stage of the fight they want to send me to prison, I am prepared. We have to show that we will not be cowed, and that the truth cannot be suppressed. Frankly, if the government think they can bury this book, they are even barmier than I thought.

Craig

9 February 2006

Mr Richard Stagg

Director General Corporate Affairs

Foreign & Commonwealth Office

London

Dear Dickie,

Thank you for your letter of 8 February about my forthcoming book, Murder in Samarkand. Let me respond to the points which you have made.

Firstly, allow me to note that, over a period of many months, you have consulted exhaustively with all the FCO staff, past and present, named in the book.

Let me then relate that to the question of libel. In your letter you state that you are ‘Also advised that there are a number of passages in your book which could well ground actions for defamation.’

Let me be quite plain. I have no desire to libel or defame anybody. So I urge you now to disclose to me those passages in the book which you have been advised may be defamatory, so that I may consider if I believe there is that danger, and remove or amend any accidental defamation.

I make this offer in all good faith, that we may avoid the publication of defamation. If you choose not to take up this fair offer, and subsequently the FCO or its employees attempt to block publication through court actions for defamation, it will be evident that this is not an attempt to avoid defamation, but a ruse to block publication of the book as a whole through vexatious and unnecessary litigation.

I repeat I have the strongest desire not to defame anybody. I know the terrible mental anguish that unjust defamation can cause. You will recall that I was myself outrageously defamed and accused, quite groundlessly, of appalling things like being an alcoholic and offering visas in exchange for sex. Of course, in my case it was the FCO which was defaming me. The complete story of why and how this happened is in fact the substance of my book. Which is why you are so keen to identify and reserve possible legal avenues for the government to block publication.

It is not falsehood which scares you, but truth.

It is plain from your letter that you object to the whole concept of my publishing this account. Nowhere in the months of negotiation between us to date did you propose any such fundamental objections as now surface in your letter. Rather you asked for a series of specific amendments, the vast majority of which I made. I am sadly reinforced in my view that this lengthy process was an effort on your part to stall publication, rather than a discussion in good faith.

On the specific points you raise, you claim that the publication on my website of material in September caused operational damage to Research Analysts. There has been numerous and frequent correspondence and personal contact between us since September. I am puzzled as to why you mention this now and have not done so before. The material in question featured on my website for 24 hours and has not done so since.

You requested me to remove material from the book which you believed was misleading on the role of Research Analysts and could cause operational difficulty. I immediately removed that passage from the text in its entirety. The only point still at dispute, is that I have in the text that a member of Research Analysts told me that people in that Department were in tears over pressure put on them to go along with claims of Iraqi WMD. You tell me that the officer, still in your employ, now denies telling me this. I have noted in the book that I say he told me this, and he apparently says he did not tell me this. People can draw their own conclusions. I cannot see why this is such a huge problem for you, or would lead you to want to ban a book.

Similarly, I formed a strong impression that the British Embassy in Tashkent was pretty inactive before my arrival. You say that is not your impression. Well, fine. That seems to me well within the range of views that should be able freely to be published in a democracy without political suppression.

I note your point on Crown Copyright. Again, I am genuinely concerned to act in a legal fashin and I should be most grateful if you would explain to me how my book differs from Christopher Meyer’s in this regard.

You told me that you had personally played a major role within the FCO in supervising the preparation of the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. I am afraid that one consequence is, that when you try to lecture me on truth, I am sorely tempted to laugh at you. I have lost my livelihood through all this. You have lost something infinitely more precious.

Finally, you threaten me with the Official Secrets Act. I am confident I am not breaking it. And if you really want to ask a jury of twelve honest citizens to send me to prison for campaigning against torture, good luck to you.

Yours Sincerely,

Craig J Murray