Murray wrote that in Uzbekistan, "conviction rates in rape trials were 100%. In fact, very high conviction rates are a standard feature of all highly authoritarian regimes... The wishes of the state in such systems vastly outweigh the liberty of the individual."
Alternative media, dissent in general, were not allowed in Uzbekistan, and Murray fears the same is occurring in the UK:
"The dreadful doctrine [of] Lady Dorrian [is] now enshrined in law, that bloggers should be held to a different (by implication higher] standard in law than the mainstream media (the judgement uses exactly those terms), because the mainstream media is self-regulating.
"This doctrine is used to justify jailing me when mainstream media journalists have not been jailed for media contempt for over half a century... The very notion of liberty is slipping from out political culture... That Scotland has a governing party which actively supports the right of the Crown to exercise unrestrained censorship is extremely worrying, and I think a sign both of the lack of respect in modern political culture for liberties which were won by people being tortured to death, and of the sheer intellectual paucity of the current governing class."
This governing class is now revising the authoritarian Official Secrets Act to place it fully in accord with the U.S. Espionage Act. Any future whistleblower, journalist and publisher will be subject to long incarceration for revealing alleged "national secrets", as if they were foreign spies during war time. And, as with the Espionage Act, defendants cannot use "public interest" as a motivation or for mitigating circumstances. Official Secrets Act: home secretary's planned reform will make criminals out of journalists (theconversation.com)
Since Murray was fired from the Foreign Office after 20 years of service, he has become a human rights and peace activist, author and journalist.
"Murder in Samarkand" is one of Murray's four books. It deals with his time in Uzbekistan before he was dismissed by the British government for telling the truth about the U.S.-funded regime of human rights abuser PresidentIslam Karimov--criticisms that included torture by his government and the CIA. The U.S. and UK supported Uzbekistan while demolishing the country of Iraq, whose president Saddam Hussein was not nearly as brutal as Karimov, Murray writes in his opposition to their hypocritical "War on Terror". Murder in Samarkand - Craig Murray
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