While George W. Bush was lecturing the international community about human rights and democracy, his CIA was flying detainees into Uzbekistan where cooperatives Uzbecs helped extract information by the "immersion of limbs in boiling liquid" and by "drowning and suffocation."

Craig Murray is now the former United Kingdom ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was suspended and then removed after a memorandum he sent to the Foreign Office was leaked. In it he complained that information gathered from tortured prisoners in Uzbekistan was being relayed by the U.S. to Great Britain and that it could be used to jail people in the United Kingdom. By accepting such information, he told his superiors "we are selling our souls for dross."

The British government did not deny that this kind of tainted information could be used, not did it claim that people were not being tortured there. Rather, efforts were made to minimize the problem by attacking the 46 year-old diplomat. Reports surfaced that he was giving out visas in return for sex, that he was drunk on the job, and that he had somehow abused an embassy car while driving it. An affair he was having with a 23 year old Uzbek hairdresser somehow made the news. In the end he received severance pay ( "redundancy payment") as well as a pension.

While the U.S. ambassador there praises the country’s advances toward democracy, Murray claims it remains a totalitarian state ruled by its old Communist boss, Islam Karimov. He notes that opposition parties were prohibited from participating in its previous election. Torture is routinely used there to obtain confessions. Ripping out nails and placing body parts in boiling water are known techniques there. CIA agents witness the torture of Uzbecs it has flown in (extraordinary rendition" via a "Ghost Plane" in from Afghanistan. This plane made at least ten trips into this torturer's paradise.

Murray claims the UK no longer has its own well-defined foreign policy and is content to be the best friend of the world’s only super power. As a private citizen, he plans to run for Parliament to remedy this situation and hold leaders of his own party responsible for helping to dummy up the case for the invasion of Iraq.

Don’t look for anyone in the US foreign policy establishment to follow his example.Indeed John Negroponte, who has just become our national director of intelligence, has a very shakey human rights record. As Reagan's ambassador to Honduras, he must have known about the death squads in central America and the dirty war being carried out there against dissidents.He reported none of this and even now denies most of it. Some believe he could have helped guide this ugly business. Is it a coincidence that these despicable acts occured on the watches of two hard right presidents?

For more on this story, check the Village Voice, April 26, 2005.