CIA PATHOLOGY UPDATE

Daniel Tencer, Raw Story - 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."

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is "endemic" to the country's justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a "totalitarian" state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Suspects in Uzbekistan's gulags "were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."

"I was absolutely stunned -- it changed my whole world view in an instant -- to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn't do the torture ourselves," Murray said.

Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

Ny Times - F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners "manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock," and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including "How close is each technique to the 'rack and screw,' " according to hundreds of pages of partly declassified documents released by the Justice Department. . .

The notes reveal that the Justice Department considered prosecuting a C.I.A. interrogator for a previously reported incident in which a detainee was threatened with a gun and a power drill, but it says department officials declined to prosecute the case.

The documents were released in the latest response to several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Judicial Watch, a Washington advocacy group.

Time - Twenty-two CIA agents who were convicted by a Milan court on Wednesday of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric are unlikely to spend any time in prison. The verdict, announced by Milan judge Oscar Magi, is only the first step in the labyrnthine Italian legal system, and the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has shown no desire to pursue the case. . .

Magi convicted 23 Americans, one of whom is an Air Force officer, for the February 2003 kidnapping of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, under the CIA's controversial "extraordinary rendition" program. Three other Americans were acquitted because they have diplomatic immunity. Two Italian secret agents were also convicted. Five other Italians were acquitted, including the head of the country's military intelligence, who resigned when the kidnapping became public. Of the 23 Americans convicted, 22 were sentenced to five years in jail; Robert Seldon Lady, the agency's former station chief in Milan, was given eight years. All of the Americans, however, were tried in absentia. . .