Top 15 Craig Murray Quotes

The Foreign Office cleared the speech, but not without an acrimonious struggle over its content. During the dispute he panned one of his superiors in the FCO's eastern department, for questioning whether the number of political prisoners in Uzbekistan had increased. According to a British official familiar with the correspondence, he wrote: "I understand that you might find this fact politically inconvenient. If you wish me to omit it, then say so. But don't pretend it isn't true." He attacked his superior for his "sadly cautious and above all completely unimaginative" censures, and attacked the "classic public school and Oxbridge influenced FCO house style", as "ponderous, self-important and ineffective".
The speech began to take on a life of its own. Kofi Annan raised its contents during a meeting with Uzbekistani president Islam Karimov. It became a serious thorn in Tashkent's - and Washington's - side. Murray's confrontational style pressed it further into the flesh. In the build-up to the Iraq war, he could not contain his fury at the "double standards" being practised by Washington. He wrote to his superiors in London on the day in which he watched [George W.] Bush talk of "dismantling the apparatus of terror" and "removing the torture and rape rooms" in Iraq, pointing out that "when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to effect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora ... I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan."

I can say from my own dealings with Murray that he is an approachable and compassionate man, who has become a hero in Uzbekistan. Two colleagues from PEN, the writers' organisation whose Writers in Prison Committee I chair, have just returned from Tashkent full of praise for him, describing how he has become virtually the only source of assistance for desperate families whose relatives have been tortured or disappeared.

[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?

In the Salisbury case, as Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan has shown, the government initially relied on a phrase that they thought could be defended as true but which was intended to cultivate a deception. This is that the nerve agent involved in the case is of "a type developed by Russia" ...
The deception was spectacularly successful. The entire mainstream media went along with it. Embarrassingly, many mainstream journalists deluged Craig Murray with abuse and ridicule for raising modest questions about the government narrative.

[The then Nadira Alieva] The next day she was walking past a nightclub and saw an advert saying "dancers needed". "It was basically a brothel," she said. But she was earning £150 a month.
Then, one April night in 2003, Murray walked in. "It was my turn to dance and I could see this man, very English-looking, with a half-smile, looking at me," she said. "He wasn't sporty-looking or handsome and I wasn't interested. I just wanted my tip. But the manager said you mustn't refuse him, he's the richest man in the place."
After chatting for a while, Murray suggested that she quit the club and become his mistress. "I told him, 'You're not the first to offer', and I left." The next time Murray returned to the club, it was Alieva's day off so he gave another girl £50 for her phone number. Flattered, she agreed to a date. Although she knew Murray was married, they were soon an item. "I'd gone out with diplomats before but Craig was different," she said. "He'd take me to official dinners and parties and introduce me to people. People were shocked as they knew I was a dancer but he didn't care."

[First sentence refers to George Galloway] At least the Respect MP refrained from naming Assange's alleged victims. No such restraint for Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, who denounced one of them by name on Newsnight, violating the British legal scruple that holds that a woman who may have suffered the trauma of rape should at least be granted basic privacy.

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

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].

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].

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].

Mr Murray is a serial "just saying" conspiracy theorist. When the Russians poisoned the Skripals in 2018, for example, Murray pointed a finger at the Israelis and suggested a British government cover-up. At the moment his big issue is the conspiracy he alleges to "fit up" the former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond on sexual assault charges (Mr Salmond was acquitted). In the past he has accused me and other Jewish writers of being "Zionist propagandists" for the sake of "available riches".

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.

I didn't really volunteer to fight the British police state, it came after me.
But here we are, and here I am, in Switzerland seeking the protection of the United Nations.

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.

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