Flashback:
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.”
…
“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.
Kandahar Governor Gul Agha’s chief of intelligence, Gulalai (AFP Photo / John Macdougall)
– Afghanistan’s ‘torturer in chief’ settles down in pink California home (RT, April 29, 2014):
Recruited to help run Afghanistan’s security and intelligence operations in the aftermath of the US war against the Taliban, the country’s most feared security official dubbed ‘torturer in chief’ now has settled in a pink two-story house in California.
Before his move to the US, Gulalai helped American troops retake Kandahar in 2001 and was tapped to run the intelligence program in the city. Later, he was put in charge of the long-term custody of prisoners at the National Directorate of Security’s headquarters in Kabul.
According to a new report by the Washington Post, Haji Gulalai has “a substantial record of human rights abuses.” On two separate occasions, United Nations officials convinced the NDS to set in motion orders to fire him from the agency, yet those efforts were stymied both times by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“He was the torturer in chief,” a senior Western diplomat, who was unnamed, told the Post.
Read moreAfghanistan’s ‘Torturer In Chief’ Settles Down In Pink California Home