craig murray, whistleblower

* leninology has a great interview with craig murray, whistleblower, ex-brit-ambassador to uzbekistan:

"Murray has always been clear that he sees this as a fight for liberalism - he is not especially radical. He simply thinks that it's a bad idea to support torture, or indeed to engage in it, to manipulate the public with false intelligence wherever and however concocted, and he thinks that you can't pretend to be waging a war as The Good Guys if you are complicit with someone like Islam Karimov. I ask him how he thinks his particular story fits into the whole ‘war on terror’.

"First of all, a lot of what I’m saying impacts on Afghanistan. The Taliban virtually stopped the production of heroin in that country, and it has now come back. Now, about 40% of what was produced was smuggled into Uzbekistan under the control of General Dostum and Islam Karimov. And we turned a blind eye because both are or were US clients. Dostum, I think, is now the Chief of the Army staff – a terrible, evil man, who killed people under tank tracks and by keeping them in containers until they died. But of course he’s an Uzbek, and that’s an important part of the dynamic in Afghanistan itself. The north of the country is Uzbek, as were the Northern Alliance for the most part."

That fits directly into Sibel's story. It would be interesting to know exactly which members of the US they were clients of, and whether Murray is talking about the heroin being a part of the business (or just a domestic side business.) I suspect we could find much the same pattern in all of the other countries that Sibel names.

Similarly, Larisa described much the same thing in our interview where she describes how useful it is to have dictatorships in client states.

Craig Murray continues:

"The other thing is about intelligence from Uzbekistan, which is basically designed to exaggerate the threat from Al Qaeda. I think, similarly, the ‘war on terror’ is a mask for a very standard imperialist grab for resources, and it fits into people’s illiberal agendas. Just as they know the intelligence from Uzbekistan was totally false, so they knew that the intelligence about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was false. I mean, the FCO is not full of idiots, they’re extremely clever, informed people who know what they’re doing. They knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. I discussed it with colleagues. A man named William Patey, another aluminus of Dundee University, who is now the British ambassador to Baghdad, was at the time the Head of the Middle Eastern Department. I asked him if it’s bollocks, and he flatly said 'Yeah, it’s bollocks.' But this false intelligence helps to justify control orders, Belmarsh, torture flights, all these things that are happening now, and many people suspect that it is false. I am able to say, from the inside, that it is. And I feel a duty and a responsibility to do it. I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, but I’ll be around for a while to fight the government over it."

(btw - bloggers interviewing ex-ambassadors! what's up with that?!)