http://www.drudge.com/user/Alexandrite New links and comments. en-us http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Wordzilla/0.58 10 http://www.drudge.com/news/126921/us-sent-detainees-uzbekistan-torture http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/former-uk-ambassador-us-sent-detainee Former UK Ambassador: US Sent Detainees to Uzbekistan for Torture 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. <p> 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. <p> "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." <p> 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. <p> Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, a 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. <p> 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." <p> "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. Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:51:45 -0500 alexandrite http://www.drudge.com/news/126921/us-sent-detainees-uzbekistan-torture#discuss tag:drudge.com,2005:weblog.126921 discussion, 0.5 daily 126921 http://www.drudge.com/news/126833/msm-fox-news-lies-fox-ratings http://mediamatters.org/columns/200911030004 Eric Boehlert: The breathless claim that Fox News' ratings recently spiked thanks to the White House's public critique is bogus hype -- hype that Fox News and the Beltway press have relentlessly pushed.< It's just not true. No matter how many times reporters and pundits made the claim, a detailed analysis of Nielsen ratings numbers clearly indicates that in the two weeks after the White House in mid-October sparked a media controversy by claiming Rupert Murdoch's channel was not a legitimate news organization, Fox News' ratings did not soar or go "through the roof." In fact, not only did Fox News' overall ratings not soar, they experienced no significant increase at all. Instead, in the two weeks following the initial verbal jousts with the White House, Fox News' total day ratings virtually flatlined. Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:25:17 -0500 Alexandrite http://www.drudge.com/news/126833/msm-fox-news-lies-fox-ratings#discuss tag:drudge.com,2005:weblog.126833 discussion, 0.5 daily 126833