Anguished as he is by his belated discovery that FCO Legal Adviser Michael Wood had not ‘stabbed him in the back’ as per the foolish description in his book, Craig Murray slumps back into despair:

I felt that Michael had stabbed me in the back by refusing to back me in saying unequivocally that intelligence from torture was illegal.

I did not know that, exactly at that time, he was engaged in a heroic struggle to try to stop the war in Iraq on legal grounds, and that he had drawn the full fury of Blair and Straw. He could not afford to open a second front on extraordinary rendition.

I have been struggling ever since to come to terms with what I saw as his going along with torture. I misjudged him…

I am feeling so sad because different ways of trying to resist took us down different paths, and perhaps I am sad because I was harsher on some than they deserved.

Craig of course misjudged practically everyone else in the FCO too as he flailed against them in his book, but it may take him a while yet to grasp that his definition of honourable behaviour is not the only one out there.

Just to add that in his comment posted on my piece as linked above, Craig once again carefully avoids answering the question (my emphasis):

I don’t understand the view that I am "misrepresenting" Michael when I have repeatedly published his letter in full and I recently published, as soon as the FCO released them, the minutes of the meeting at which he gave the advice.

HIs advice and what precisely it meant was discussed by me and by Prof Phillippe Sands before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in very careful and measured terms.

I was and remain disappointed that Michael did not give me more support on the torture issue. I now know, which I did not at the time, that at that precise time (March 7 to 14 2003) Michael was under incredible pressure over his attempts to prevent an illegal war. He couldn’t open a second front on extraordinary rendition.

To which one says, piffle.

Since the whole point of Craig’s fight with the FCO at that point, namely March 2003, was nothing to do with extraordinary rendition. Rather it was all about the way he had been publicly attacking the Uzbek regime over its human rights abuses. The extraordinary rendition issue appears in his book only much later, namely p 362.

The core of Craig’s case as put by him to the FCO at that point (and described in his book) was that the Uzbek regime was breaking international law and that HMG were breaking international law by using intelligence information from Uzbekistan which they had good reason to think had been extracted under torture.

This was the argument he put in a Top Secret telegram sent in late 2002 (Murder in Samarkand, p 138), namely that by ‘obtaining’ this intelligence on a regular basis HMG were ‘undoubtedly’ in breach of Article 4 of the UN Convention on Torture which banned ‘complicity’ in torture.

And this was the issue which was tackled head-on in Craig’s disastrous (for him) meeting at the FCO with Michael Wood. Michael said that he did not agree with Craig: possessing or indeed using information obtained under torture did not amount to complicity under the Convention. However, Article 15 did rule out the use of such material in any legal proceedings ("except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made").

Craig in MiS records his dismay. Shock! Michael was not agreeing with some of his human rights lawyer friends!

Michael then wrote a minute to confirm the position in writing. This is the famous document so often cited by Craig on his site as evidence for HMG’s evil-doing.

And, as previously noted, Michael is a good enough lawyer to have judged this point accurately. The House of Lords later upheld his view in a landmark judgement. The fact that Philippe Sands QC and Craig happen to think that the law in this area ought to be something else does not mean anything that matters.

All of this is absurdly described in MiS thus: "Torture by proxy for intelligence purposes was legal".

Simply. Not. True.

Craig now breezily brushes aside as ‘casuistry’ anything which spells out his obvious errors and inconsistencies, and keeps trying to cash in on his erstwhile junior Ambassador status to boost his claim to know what was ‘really’ going on.

Maybe his trivial failure not to let the truth stand in the way of a loud argument was one reason why he crashed from the FCO – and won no sympathy at all from senior colleagues who shared many of his reservations about the policy but maintained professional discipline.