The Sundance Channel is currently reshowing the 2005 documentary by investigative reporter Andrew Gilligan and producer Sarah McDonald Torture: The Dirty Business. The whole one hour documentary is well worth the time: see it if you can! It exposes the multinational torture industry, HQed by the U.S. The U.S. and U.K. lead this industry by both creating supply and demand. They supply victims through the practice “extraordinary rendition”: kidnapping unconvicted, unindicted, uncharged (!) Al Queda suspects who are then exported to other countries for torture processing and then purchasing the torture “information product” for U.S. and U.K. consumption. Perhaps the most ironic part is the fact the “information” obtained this way is so useless it would best be sent straight to the dust bin. Let’s us fast forward to the last segment of the documentary [jump down]:
Craig Murray is the former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray’s investigations uncovered the Uzbekistan government’s widespread engagement torture of thousands every year manufacture disinformation about Al Queda to feed to MI6 and the CIA. It would not be exaggerating to call this torture business a Uzbekistan government industry for disinformation export. He wrote a strong report to his superiors making it clear that the torture “product” the U.K. and U.S. are purchasing from Uzbekistan was in his words “useless” and was entirely confabulated to conform to what the CIA and MI6 wanted to hear and coined the phrase “selling our souls for dross” to describe this.
Upon receiving Murray’s report, rather than halt the practice, the U.K. government actually sacked Murry from his ambassadorship! Afterwards Murray expected public and media outrage to swell and stop the British practice of encouraging torture by proxy. He was taken aback when that didn’t happen and now reports he’s concluded that the UK doesn’t stand for the values that he thought it did any longer.
See also the Scotland Herald review of this documentary by Damien Love entitled “Pain But No Gain: The reality of torture”.
Murray may be somewhat relieved at this point since the House of Lords just this past week that it will no longer admit any evidence produced by the torture industry and meanwhile the McCain amendment is being hammered out in Washington. Will this truly halt the U.S. and U.K.’s consumption of “torture product”? Officially anyway maybe yes. We’ll see if MI6 and the CIA stop it in reality.
