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Mon 10 Jul, 2006 11:17 pm
Quote:Former ambassador posts censored passages from memoir on website
· Government threatens to sue over 'damaging' claims
· Dissident official claimed UK complicity in torture
David Leigh
Tuesday July 11, 2006
The Guardian
The government is threatening to sue former ambassador Craig Murray for breach of copyright if he does not remove from his website intelligence material that was censored out of his newly published memoirs.
Mr Murray has posted full texts of all passages the Foreign Office ordered deleted from the book version of Murder in Samarkand, the former Tashkent ambassador's account of alleged British complicity in torture by the despotic Uzbekistan regime. His book contains links to the website.
The passages detail CIA intelligence reports that Mr Murray says were false, and accounts of US National Security Agency intercepts and conversations with John Herbst, the US ambassador in Uzbekistan at the time. The Foreign Office says release of the material is damaging.
One previously censored passage describes how numerical codes on intelligence reports revealed they came from the Uzbek secret police, via the CIA, who shared them with MI6. These included, he says, "nonsensical" claims that Islamist militants were ready to swoop on the town of Samarkand from hilltop camps, and that Uzbek dissidents were linked to al-Qaida.
Full report from The Guardian
Homepage Craig Murray
This happened a while back, as I recall...I mean the Ambassador blowing the whistle?????
It has taken them this long to react?
Added:
Ah, reading the article...now I get what is different.
This is interesting, legally speaking, I think:
The Foreign Office is also demanding, in a claim that breaks new legal ground, that Mr Murray remove from his website the text of Foreign Office correspondence which he says he obtained officially through Freedom of Information Act and Data Protection Act requests.
The Treasury solicitors, the government lawyers, wrote to Mr Murray last week claiming: "Even if a document is released under the Freedom of Information Act or the Data Protection Act, that does not entitle you to make further reproductions of that document by, for example, putting them on your website."
Are they also going to try to argue that about material from legally obtained documents published as part of newspaper etc accounts?
Newspapers also publish on the web.
I do hope that claim, if tested in court, is shot down in flames.
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