While serving as Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004, Craig Murray formally warned Foreign Office superiors that intelligence supplied by Uzbek authorities—and passed through or used by the CIA and MI6—had been obtained through torture. He argued that detainees were being forced to sign confessions and that the resulting claims about Islamist militants and alleged al-Qaeda links were both morally and legally impermissible and operationally unreliable. In an October 2002 speech cleared by the Foreign Office, Murray described Uzbekistan as an authoritarian state holding an estimated 7,000–10,000 political or religious prisoners and cited reports of torture, including the boiling deaths of two men.
The disclosures created a conflict between human-rights obligations and the intelligence relationship maintained with President Islam Karimov’s government after the September 11 attacks. Murray was investigated in 2003 after being presented with 18 misconduct charges; the Foreign Office dropped all but two, and in January 2004 minister Bill Rammell said the government endorsed Murray’s assessment of Uzbekistan’s human-rights situation. After the Financial Times published an internal dispatch in 2004, Murray was suspended and removed from his post in October; the Foreign Office attributed the action to disciplinary and media-conduct issues, while Murray described himself as a victim of conscience. Later reporting linked Uzbekistan to the secret U.S. extraordinary-rendition program, intensifying scrutiny of Western reliance on intelligence from torture-practicing regimes.
