Friday, November 06, 2009

Former Brit Ambassador Craig Murray says UK and USA sent prisoners to Uzbek to be tortured


More at The Real News




"CRAIG MURRAY, FMR. UK AMBASSADOR TO UZBEKISTAN: I got called back to London and I expected there, you know, to have a sensible talk about the merits or demerits of the intelligence and how much evidence I had that it was obtained under torture. I was absolutely stunned, genuinely stunned—it changed my whole worldview in an instant—to be told that—and I knew it was coming from torture—that it was not illegal, because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture, as long as we didn't do the torture ourselves.

I just couldn't believe the chap who was telling me this, the foreign office's chief legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, [who] was somebody I'd known for many, many years. He was a nice man. He is a nice man. And how somebody—you know, I thought, you're talking about children being tortured in front of their parents, and you're saying, "Well, I don't think Clause 4 quite covers it, and given this particular legal meaning of the word 'complicity'."

1 comment:

Oneiros said...

Yup, knew that. The same Uzbekistan that the EU just started selling weapons to, again. Guess they promised not to boil detainees in hot water again, scout's honor...