of October" 2002, Nick Cohen wrote in The Observer, Murray "delivered a speech which broke with all the established principles of Foreign Office diplomacy". "The brave and honest ambassador", Cohen commented, spoke at a human rights conference hosted by Freedom House in Tashkent, although David Stern reported in January 2003 for EurasiaNet that other western officials had made similar comments. In the speech, Murray said that: Nick Paton Walsh wrote in The Guardian that "[t]he Foreign Office cleared the speech, but not without an acrimonious struggle over its content". Murray also said in his speech that the boiling to death of two men (reportedly members of Hizb ut-Tahrir) was "not an isolated incident". A photograph of one of the men showed that his fingernails had been pulled out. The American ambassador John Herbst was present at the event and reportedly "livid" at Murray's speech. According to a report in The Sunday Times, he was advised by Whitehall not to antagonise the government in Tashkent any further. The Americans were said to have put pressure on the British government for Murray to tone down his comments. The then Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan confronted Uzbek President Islam Karimov with Murray's claims. Murray was summoned to the FCO in London and, on 8 March 2003, was reprimanded for writing to his employers, in response to a speech by President of the United States George W. Bush criticising human rights violations by Saddam Hussein, that "when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora. Double standards? Yes". Murray believed the human rights abuses in Uzbekistan were worse than in Iraq in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, but that the latter was being invaded while the government of the former was being supported. In an internal document by Murray, later leaked to the Financial Times, he commented that Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) used intelligence provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the Uzbek authorities gained through torture. Murray wrote that "[t]orture dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe". "It is morally, legally and practically wrong to continue to receive this material. It is hypocritical and fatally undermines our moral standing", he wrote in a