Sordid Details on 'Black Site' on Diego Garcia Island Come to Light

[babylonsister]

Sordid Details on 'Black Site' on Diego Garcia Island Come to Light

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted March 11, 2008.

For years, America has been using a British island as a landing pad for its torture taxis -- only now has the U.K. admitted to it.


British Foreign Secretary David Miliband issued an embarrassing apology to members of Parliament last month. Despite "earlier explicit assurances" to the contrary, he admitted, two planes carrying prisoners of the U.S. "war on terror" had landed on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia in 2002 before flying to foreign territory as part of the American extraordinary rendition program.

One flight went on to Guantánamo, one to Morocco. The identities of the detainees remain classified, but one of them has since been set free. According to the CIA, neither was tortured. But -- Miliband would have the public believe -- the CIA didn't bother to tell the British government that its territory was being used as a landing pad for American torture taxis.

Human rights attorneys and a handful of British MPs have long raised the possibility that Diego Garcia, a small island in the Indian Ocean that is home to a massive American military base, has played a role in extraordinary rendition -- and that it is among the United States' "black sites" -- secret CIA-run prisons, the existence of which President Bush himself confirmed in 2006. Even loose-lipped American officials have acknowledged it. As London-based human rights attorney Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal organization Reprieve (which, over a year ago, unearthed flight logs recording the arrival and departure of a CIA rendition plane at Diego Garcia), wrote in the Guardian last January:

British denials are difficult to square with the words of U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey ... recently retired from running Southcom, the military command that oversees Guantánamo. He was asked in May 2004 where the thousands of ghost prisoners were being held. "You know, Bagram Air Field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq," he replied.

Yet the Blair and Brown administrations continually denied it. Until now.

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http://www.alternet.org/rights/79273/?page=entire

[Solly Mack]

1. I have posted several threads on Diego Garcia and how it was used for more than just "refueling"

and "landings"....it's been long known (about Diego Garcia) and the British govt. is lying to say otherwise.

[SoCalDem]

2. Diego Garcia IS a travesty.. Do you know how we "got" it?

We "cleansed" the island and ruined yet another indigenous population who had happlit been living there since..forever..


Stealing a Nation
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zmag.org%2Fsustainers%2Fcontent%2F2004-10%2F13pilger.cfm&ei=l5DWR9ScDIvSpgSy2rDvDA&usg=AFQjCNEX88FXSVscHuTlyBL6yFg9AzP0yg&sig2=BYGwAx2a-54wIhJTR8moqQ

October 13, 2004

Stealing A Nation

By John Pilger

There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: "American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan)." It is the word "uninhabited" that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defence in London produced this epic lie: "There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation."

Diego Garcia was first settled in the late eighteenth century. At least 2,000 people lived there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon, catching fish.

All this began to end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American bases in the world. There are now more than 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars, a golf course. "Camp Justice" the Americans call it.

During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitise" the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.

To get rid of the population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be "returned" to Mauritius, a thousand miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert all the existing residents... into short term, temporary residents."

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Ofice, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. (ours in italics). There will be no indigenous pipulation except seagulls." At the end of this is a hand-written note by D H Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: "Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays..." Under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", another official urges his colleagues to re-classify the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make up the rules as we go along".

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[sicksicksick_N_tired]

3. :^(

;(