What was Sting doing in Uzbekistan?

Ex-ambassador for the UK and whistleblower, Craig Murray, recently wrote a piece on his blog exposing the musician Sting for having played a 'charity concert' in Tashkent alongside the Uzbek dictator's daughter, Gulnara Karimova, "for some of the 'Charities' which have been set up in the past three years as the regime seeks to burnish her image to take over from her dissident massacring father."

Sting (Gordon Sumner) is known for having founded The Rainforest Foundation in 1989 along with his wife, Trudie Styler.

So "the greatest irony of the arch tosser Sumner's involvement is that the Uzbek government not only tortures thousands every year, has ten thousand political prisoners and massacres demonstrators. It is also responsible for one of the world's greatest environmental disasters - the disappearance of the Aral Sea, and the huge toxicity of the remnant and of the blown seabed dust."

Murray goes onto ask the question, "[d]id it not occur to Sting to wonder just where his glamorous hostess gets her billions from? Karimov and his daughter have for decades resisted every attempt to liberalise and diversify Uzbekistan's agriculture. The slaves pick [cotton] for them. And for Sting, apparently."

How is it possible that Sting would have accepted playing a gig in a country known throughout the world for being run by a barbaric dictator such as Karimov? It is inconceivable that he would not have known.

"The arsehole Sumner may not have noticed, but in the last three years even Wal-Mart, Marks and Spencers and Tesco have put a total ban on Uzbek cotton in all the clothing they sell."

Was he that short of cash to stoop so low or did something else take him to Tashkent? Back in the 'seventies, Sumner helped to co-found a rock group called The Police with Stewart Copeland who became the drummer. They called the group The Police because Copeland's father worked for the CIA and his mother for British intelligence.

Personality clashes led to the break-up of The Police. But maybe the old, spooky associations never died out after all?

USUK made use of Uzbek torture
Former British ambassador, Craig Murray, says UK and USA sent prisoners to Uzbekistan to be tortured

Here Craig Murray describes the US ally, Uzbekistan, as a totalitarian dictatorship left over from the former Brezhnev, Soviet regime which holds over ten thousand political prisoners. "They still operate the old, Soviet gulags."

"Torture in Uzbekistan isn't unusual. It happens to several thousands of people every year ... The intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA and passed onto MI6 because MI6 and the CIA share all their intelligence."

"When people were being tortured they were being told to confess to membership of Al Qaeda. They were being told to confess to have been in training camps in Afghanistan and told to confess to have met Osama Bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes. They spoke of Uzbeks having been in Al Qaeda, in training camps and meeting Osama Bin Laden. In fact we were now in 2002-2003 when we didn't know where Osama Bin Laden was and the way he managed to see thousands of Uzbeks every year it would have been easier to track him down I felt!"

"It wasn't hard to put two and two together and work out the fact that every political prisoner I knew of in Uzbekistan was tortured and the fact that we knew of what they were being forced to confess under this torture and the CIA material came up with the same, rather dodgy narrative. It wasn't hard to put two and two together and realise that the intelligence material was coming from torture."

"Before I did anything I wanted to make sure I was on safe ground so I asked my deputy to go to the American Embassy and say to them, 'My ambassador is worried because he thinks your intelligence is coming from torture.' She came back and reported to me the reply from the CIA head in the station at Tashkent [which] was, 'Yes, of course it's coming from torture, We don't see that as a problem in the context of the war on terror.'"

"I did see that as a problem, particularly when I discovered that the CIA were bringing in people, flying in people to Uzbekistan and handing them over to the Uzbek security services ... I falsely presumed that these people they were bringing in and handing over to the security services were Uzbeks who had been captured elsewhere and brought back to Uzbekistan. I did not realise that they were of many other nationalities being handed over to be tortured."

"But they were being tortured, I knew, [but] that Uzbekistan was a destination for the extraordinary rendition system from all over the world I really didn't quite realise at the time. We now know, following for example the Council of Europe's investigation that 90% of the aeroplanes that stopped at the famous secret prison in Poland had Tashkent as their next destination."

"I complained back to London. I said we're getting this evidence from torture. It's illegal, it's immoral and it's unreliable. It's vastly exaggerating the strength of Al Qaeda in Central Asia ... I got called back to London and I expected there to have a sensible talk about the merits and demerits of intelligence and how much evidence I had that it was obtained under torture. I was absolutely stunned, genuinely stunned --it changed my whole world-view in an instant-- to be told that London knew that it was coming from torture, that it wasn't illegal because our legal advisers thought 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."

Murray's first-hand evidence clearly illustrates how Blair and the British government were complicit in Bush's brutal, fake war on terror.



Craig Murray's Blog

Uzbek Terror and the USUK

Ex-ambassador Craig Murray exposes the horrific tortures taking place in Uzbekistan and the reasons why the USUK are secretly complicit in them.

"Anyone interested in hydrocarbon resources needs to be in Uzbekistan," he observes. He highlights two incidents of torture after which he began to realize that greatly exaggerated CIA intelligence reports were resulting from them. He reports that the CIA were flying in people to be tortured.

"I knew the CIA people who were doing it," he claims.

"When Bush came into power the relationship between the US and Uzbekistan became very cosy" Now Obama is planning to warm up the relationship and to beef up the Uzbek dictator, Karimov.

"To find out that respect for international law and human rights had gone out of the window and that people I knew and worked with were prepared to justify torture and that people knew we were using torture to beef up the terrorist scare ... when something like that hits you it really does plunge you into questioning everything you ever believed in."

"Nobody can hear you Scream"
Former UK Ambassador gives Parliamentary Committee evidence of UK Government Complicity in Torture

Yesterday, Tuesday, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, gave evidence to the UK's parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights of what he believes is damning complicity of the UK government in receiving evidence obtained under torture.

The entire proceedings are recorded on video on the parliamentary TV video player and recorded on YouTube as well as included on the blog, Ten Percent. The first part of the YouTube video is to be seen below.

Unsurprisingly, events passed by the MSM with nary a comment, the exception being a report by the BBC hidden deep in one of its websites.

"Just before I gave my evidence to Parliament yesterday," comments Craig Murray on his blog, "my sister Celia telephoned me to say that I would be speaking not for myself but for all those thousands who had suffered unspeakable torture around the World in the War on Terror, whose screams and sometimes death rattles were heard only by their torturers. She told me I was speaking for those who could not speak."

"But I am completely astonished, and horribly depressed, that there has been almost no mainstream media of this quite sensational information."

"I really cannot understand why no newspaper or TV channel has covered what is quite a startling development in a prominent continuing story on the use of torture in the War on Terror."

"I had hoped that my evidence yesterday would be a significant step in ending the policy of obtaining intelligence from torture, and of bringing to account the ministers who approved it. But without any sign of public or media interest, the politicians will feel they can safely ignore the truth I told."

This blogger sympathises with and supports Craig Murray's feelings. Standing up to the lies and deceit of a corrupt government and establishment Craig Murray has campaigned tirelessly over several years for the truth to be known. Indeed, given the explosive nature of his story, it is singularly remarkable that his views were finally given an airing on the parliamentary JCHR. And given the huge investment made by the MSM in covering-up the government's war criminality and complicity in torture it is hardly surprising that this signal event should have gone ignored.

In current parlance, Craig Murray's appearance at the JCHR was nothing less than a defining moment that now must not be allowed to fall down the memory hole. If the MSM won't cover it then the alternative media must. I am therefore appealing to all those active in the blogosphere to post this information far and wide. The world must hear the truth.



A lengthy and insightful interview with Craig Murray is at Lenin's Tomb: "A man of the highest principle": an interview with Craig Murray.

Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time

Our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is the greatest recruiting sergeant for Islamic militants. As the great diplomat, soldier and adventurer Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alexander Burnes pointed out before his death in the First Afghan War in 1841, there is no point in a military campaign in Afghanistan as every time you beat them, you just swell their numbers. Our only real achievement to date is falling street prices for heroin in London.

Remember this article next time you hear a politician calling for more troops to go into Afghanistan. And when you hear of another brave British life wasted there, remember you can add to the casualty figures all the young lives ruined, made miserable or ended by heroin in the UK.

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Craig Murray's Blog under Attack

Blair government whistle-blower and ex-UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has been victim to hack attacks on his blog recently.

Some days ago, his blog was down for over 48 hours. So I wrote him, asking him if it was an attack. He replied,

Yes, it was an attack - here is more from my tech people:

"Latest update is that the attack is still ongoing and every time the server is brought back up, the attack brings it straight back down. As soon as the attack abates, the server will be back."

The blog is back up but I understand there's a mirror site, just in case.

So why should Her Majesty's spooks suddenly decide to attack Craig?

Is it anything to do with the fact an ex-UK Ambassador with a sense of old-fashioned integrity has dared to go public, as he has, to comment upon the insidiously corrupt nature of not only the Blair government but those in the establishment, incuding the MSM and the BBC, who back him?

Was this attack meant to intimidate him? If it was I suspect it'll take more than that.

Read Craig's blog here