Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is expected to appear in a UK court tomorrow!

[Jan Klimkowski]

Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekhistan, whom I quoted before in this thread, has also made a speech just before Assange.

Carsten - Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan and decided, rather naively, that a President who considers it normal to boil to death political opponents should be, ahem, spoken to about human rights abuses.

He then went further:

Murray was removed from his post in October 2004, shortly after a leaked report in the Financial Times quoted him as claiming that MI6 used intelligence provided by Uzbek authorities through torture.[18] The FCO denied there was any direct connection and stated that Murray had been removed for "operational" reasons. It claimed that he had lost the confidence of senior officials and colleagues. The following day, in an interview on the Today Programme, the BBC's flagship political radio show, Murray countered that he was a "victim of conscience", and in this and other interviews was critical of the FCO.[19] A few days later he was charged with "gross misconduct" by the FCO for making these media appearances.[20] Murray agreed to resign from the FCO in February 2005.

In his 2007 book Murder in Samarkand, Murray speculates that his anti-torture memos caused two problems for the US & UK governments. First, the CIA's extraordinary rendition program was secretly using Uzbekistan as a country to which to fly people to be tortured. Second, the transcripts of the torture sessions were then shared with Britain's MI6 because of the UK-US intelligence sharing agreements of WWII. By objecting to the UK's acceptance of CIA torture-obtained information, he was interfering with the secret rendition program as well as threatening the MI6's relationship with the CIA.

As for then Prime Minister Blair, the now global consultant:

"is paid in the region of £3 million a year to advise both JP Morgan, the US investment bank, and also Zurich International, the global insurer based in Switzerland. On top of that he runs his own consultancy firm - Tony Blair Associates - which advises the oil and gas rich governments of Kuwait and Kazakhstan."