UK torture memos spread

The story of Craig Murray's leaking of documents showing that the UK was complicit in torture in Uzbekistan is spreading around the world. Not only has it been mentioned on hundreds of blogs, it has also appeared in the Independent, Al Jazeera, Scoop (of course), The Times, UPI, Slate and CNews. For those who are interested, there's a tracker here

The Register puts the finger on exactly what the problem is for the British government:

There is little obvious in the documents that one would not be able to read at Human Rights Watch, or at the blog Murray started up after he ceased to be an FCO employee; the point, and the difficulty for the FCO, is that they establish who said what, to whom, when. Claims by the FCO and the Government in general that it does not procure evidence via torture and that it is unaware that torture is taking place can most kindly be viewed as superlatively disingenuous when seen against the background of Murray's letters. In order to sustain the 'see no evil' policy in the face of these, Jack Straw must presumably also now claim to have been entirely unaware of what one of his own ambassadors was telling him, repeatedly and at some considerable length.

Unfortunately, that level of denial hasn't posed any problem for the Blair government in the past...