Craig Murray, a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, the father of a newborn infant, a man in bad health, and without a criminal record, will have to surrender to Scottish police on Sunday morning. He is the first person to be imprisoned for the nebulous and ill-defined crime of "jigsaw identification."
Murray is also the first person to be imprisoned in Britain for contempt of court in half a century, at a time when the British establishment had only recently stopped the prosecution of "homosexuals" and the imprisonment of women who had abortions.
Murray's eight-month sentence by Lady Dorrian, Scotland's second-highest court judge, is, of course, fully based on a careful interpretation of Scottish law rather than proof of the Scottish and London political elites pursuing vengeance on the former ambassador. The UK supreme court's rejection to hear Murray's appeal on Thursday, despite several apparent legal irregularities in the case, opening the way for his imprisonment, is also based on a rigorous application of the law, and not swayed in any way by political considerations.
Murray's imprisonment had nothing to do with the fact that in the early 2000s, he humiliated the British government by becoming that rarest of creatures: a whistleblower diplomat. He revealed the British government's and the US's complicity in Uzbekistan's torture program.
Murray's imprisonment also has nothing to do with the fact that he has recently embroiled the British state by reporting on egregious and ongoing legal abuses in a London courtroom as Washington seeks to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and imprison him for life in a maximum-security prison. The US seeks to punish Assange for exposing the US's war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for releasing secret diplomatic cables that exposed Washington's odious foreign policy.
Murray's imprisonment has nothing to do with the fact that the Scottish court used contempt proceedings against him to strip him of his passport, preventing him from traveling to Spain to testify in a similar Assange case that has embroiled the UK and the US. The US unlawfully spied on Assange within the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought political refuge to escape extradition, according to reams of evidence given before the Spanish hearing. Murray was set to testify that his private talks with Assange, as well as Assange's protected sessions with his own attorneys, were recorded. If the judge in London had really applied the law, the case against Assange would have been dismissed.
Murray's imprisonment has little to do with his humiliating the Scottish political and legal systems by reporting the defence case in the trial of Scotland's former First Minister, Alex Salmond, virtually single-handedly. The evidence presented by Salmond's attorneys led a jury majority by women to acquit him of a slew of sexual assault allegations, which went unnoticed by the corporate media. Murray's present problems stem from his coverage of Salmond's case.
And Murray's imprisonment has nothing to do with his claim – which might explain why the jury was so unimpressed by the prosecution case – that Salmond was the victim of a high-level plan by top Holyrood politicians to destroy him and prevent his return to the forefront of Scottish politics.
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