STATEMENT FROM CRAIG MURRAY, UPON RECEIVING THE SAM
ADAMS AWARD at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity by the Bush
Administration,
JANUARY 21, 2006, NYC
The former British
ambassador Craig Murray is well known for blowing the whistle on
professional
torturers in Uzbekistan acting as proxy for the U.S./U.K. ‘coalition of
the willing.’ According to Murray, Washington and London have
been ‘willing’ to look aside as the
Uzbeks boil (yes, boil) the bodies of ‘suspected terrorists’ in the
quest for
intelligence to pursue the ‘war on terror.’
Murray was honored by a group of former U.S. intelligence
officers named Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII),
whose annual awardees include FBI special agent Coleen Rowley (2002), British
intelligence whistleblower Katharine Gun (2003), and former FBI translator
Sibel Edmonds (2004).
Craig Murray on receiving the Samuel Adams Award:
Thank you Ann [Wright], and thank you to the
associates of Samuel Adams. I’m deeply grateful and deeply touched. I am
especially grateful for the candlestick because since I lost my job I can’t
afford to pay the electricity bill. I will only say a very few brief words
because I am testifying in an hour or so’s time so you will see quite enough of
me. But I’m absolutely delighted to receive the award which celebrates a great
man, Sam Adams, and which has been received by so many people who in many cases
were much braver and more honorable than I.
I would like to say something about the advance of
evil and how easily it advances. I genuinely at no stage felt I was doing
anything either heroic or exceptional. When I came across cases of people being
boiled alive, cases of daughters being raped in front of their fathers, cases
of torture of children, and the fact that we were receiving intelligence from
those torture sessions, it seemed to me axiomatic that anyone brought up in the
United States or the United Kingdom would believe their overriding and only
duty was to stop it. And, perhaps naively, when I started trying to stop it
internally, I actually believed that this must be the work of renegade people
at lower levels and that once senior politicians in the UK
and US knew what was happening, they would stop it. I was quickly
disillusioned. I discovered this part of a wider international policy of the
use of torture in the pursuit of the war on terror. It was a terrible moment
for me. I discovered that the system and the country I’d served my whole life
didn’t stand for what I believed it did. And I went to meetings with colleagues
of mine. People I had known for over 20 years. Ordinary nice people who were
setting down on paper strategies by which what we were doing could be said not
to circumvent the UN convention against torture. And I was looking at them
thinking, ‘I know you. I know you. We’ve drunk together. We’ve played golf
together. You are setting up justification for torture. How did this come
about?’
This may sound exaggerated. But it isn’t. At that
moment I understood how some civil servant ended up writing out the orders for
cattle trucks to go to Auschwitz,
and felt they were only ‘doing their job.’ And ladies and gentlemen, that is
what we face now: the flight toward fascism.
I am delighted to receive the award. Delighted to
make the acquaintance of such good people. I find it’s a shame that we have now
reached a stage where people like Ray [McGovern], and Ann [Wright], and Scott
Ritter, the real patriots who stand for the values that were supposed to
underpin the states we live in, the real patriots, are those who are condemned
as traitors, and people who dress themselves in flag of patriotism are the real
traitors to Western values. Thank you very much indeed.