Craig Murray's Stand on Torture

December 15, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Craig Murray was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2002. After exposing torture that was backed by the U.S. and Britain, he was forced to resign as ambassador in early 2005. Accepting an award for Integrity in Intelligence in 2005, Murray said:

“I would like to say something about the advance of evil and how easily it advances. I genuinely at no stage felt I was doing anything either heroic or exceptional. When I came across cases of people being boiled alive, cases of daughters being raped in front of their fathers, cases of torture of children, and the fact that we were receiving intelligence from those torture sessions, it seemed to me axiomatic that anyone brought up in the United States or the United Kingdom would believe their overriding and only duty was to stop it. And, perhaps naively, when I started trying to stop it internally, I actually believed that this must be the work of renegade people at lower levels and that once senior politicians in the UK and U.S. knew what was happening, they would stop it. I was quickly disillusioned. I discovered this part of a wider international policy of the use of torture in the pursuit of the war on terror. It was a terrible moment for me. I discovered that the system and the country I’d served my whole life didn’t stand for what I believed it did. And I went to meetings with colleagues of mine. People I had known for over 20 years. Ordinary nice people who were setting down on paper strategies by which what we were doing could be said not to circumvent the UN convention against torture. And I was looking at them thinking, ‘I know you. I know you. We’ve drunk together. We’ve played golf together. You are setting up justification for torture. How did this come about?’"

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