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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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November 4th,
2009 - CIA Sent People to Be ‘Raped with Broken Bottles’ |
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Former UK Ambassador: CIA Sent
People to Be ‘Raped with Broken Bottles’ By Daniel Tencer Raw Story November 4, 2009 The CIA relied on
intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where
widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and
boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian
country. Craig Murray, the rector of
the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to
Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through
extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its
extraordinary rendition program. "I'm talking of people
being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month
that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people
having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession.
I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these
torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed
on." Human rights groups have
long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007,
Human Rights Watch declared that torture is "endemic" to the
country's justice system. Murray said he only realized
after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured
in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a "totalitarian" state that
has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet
Union. Suspects in Uzbekistan's
gulags "were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were
told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told
to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence
constantly echoed these themes." "I was absolutely
stunned - it changed my whole world view in an instant - to be told that
London knew [the intelligence] 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,"
Murray said. It's The Pipeline, Stupid Murray asserts that the
primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia
has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As
evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through
Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran
when transporting natural gas out of the region. Murray alleged that in the
late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George
W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came
agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan's
natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the
Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. "The consultant who was
organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of
Afghanistan," Murray noted. Murray said part of the
motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through
forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on
terror, so that the pipeline could be built. "There are designs of
this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan,
as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that
undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's
what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about
democracy." The Trans-Afghanistan
Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from
the Asian Development Bank. Murray was dismissed from
his position as ambassador in 2004, following his first public allegations
that the British government relied on torture in Uzbekistan for intelligence. External link: http://rawstory.com/2009/11/ambassador-cia-people-tortured/ |