Craig Murray Quotes

A conspiracy to attack the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps. If you think I was accusing them of being part of a conspiracy to kill Skripal, you are daft.

The revelation of the identities of the complainers would be likely to result in considerable abuse and harassment (particularly on social media) against them. There was a real danger that they would be physically harmed [from paragraph 57 of the original source].

This is an enormous abuse of human rights. The abuse of process in refusing both a lawyer and the right to remain silent, the inquiry into perfectly legal campaigning which is in no way terrorism-associated, the political questioning, the financial snooping and the seizure of material related to my private life, were all based on an utterly fake claim that I am associated with terrorism.

So how will we do? Well, surprisingly well. There is real anger at the war. People don't like liars. And Straw is plainly very worried. Unlike previous elections, he has not been out to marginals to support other candidates. Rather Gordon Brown, Robin Cook and even the Iraqi deputy prime minister have been here to bolster him. Neither the Lib Dems nor the Tories see this as winnable; they have not brought in a single big hitter. Of whom is he scared? Me.

This morning, lawyers are acting on my request to prepare a counsel's opinion on the legality of publishing those of Stewart MacDonald's emails which are in the public interest to be revealed.
This may take a day or two.

I have obtained access to all of Stewart McDonald's emails, after approaching a number of people to find out who might have them.
I had no hand in obtaining the emails nor prior knowledge. I am grateful they have been so generously shared.

The petitioner deliberately set out to publish information likely to lead to the identification of the complainers and did so [from paragraph 80 of the original source].

[On his posting to Tashkent in Uzbekistan] Unless you've lived in a totalitarian state, it comes as a hell of a shock to see the sheer weight of the police presence. There are four policemen on every bloody street corner.
There's 40,000 armed policemen in Tashkent city. There are about the same number of plain-clothes officers from the security services too. Effectively the leadership that was there when the Soviet Union existed is still in charge. They've replaced communist ideology with nationalist ideology whilst maintaining the same power structures.

My experience of British airports being discouraging recently, I went by public transport from Edinburgh to Belfast.
Arriving very late in Belfast due to the storm, I missed the last train to Dublin. Not wanting to stay in Belfast, I flagged down a taxi in the street and asked the driver to take me to Dublin. He did not wish to, so late at night.
Then we realised we had worked in the same bar in Aviemore 45 years ago. I have always believed life is governed by forces we do not know.

The whole thing's extraordinary, I don't think anybody can seriously believe I have any connection to terrorism of any kind.

[Murray seems] to find it difficult to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact.

[I]n 2002, some months after MI6 sent its advice, the recently arrived British ambassador to Uzbekistan inquired urgently of the Foreign Office what its legal justification was for receiving information from Islamic dissidents who had been boiled alive to produce it. Craig Murray records his astonishment on being recalled to London to be told that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had decided that in the 'War on Terror' we should, as a matter of policy, use intelligence obtained through torture by foreign intelligence services. A follow-up memo from a Foreign Office legal adviser in March 2003 explained that it was not an offence to do so. How sound was this advice legally? Morally, there is no question. But what of the encouragement to torture resulting from our enthusiastic receipt of information?

The petitioner [Murray] is an intelligent person whose actions were deliberate and calculated.
They clearly showed contempt for the court's order and for the rule of law.
They created serious risks for the complainers' mental and physical health [from paragraph 82 of the original source].

I want to reassure Mr McDonald that his hysterical ranting about being hacked by a state intelligence service, when he appears by his own account to have fallen for a phishing scam the average 12-year-old would see through, is hilariously wide of the mark.

The problem with the world is there are conspiracies [...] The idea that they don't happen is ridiculous. As an ambassador I have seen the establishment from the inside, the workings of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 with millions in their budgets — what kind of things do you think they are doing?
The hands of the British state are all over this. The roots of it were a political conspiracy against Alex Salmond, to destroy both his reputation and career, and why, because he was a threat to the British state, one of the biggest threats in 300 years who had taken the country to the brink of independence.