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

[leftchick]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/79273/

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:

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In the States, the controversy has gotten little press -- in no small part because Americans have known for years that their elected officials are in the kidnap/torture business. But in Britain, where the government has denied any role in their ally's unsavory program, officials are pleading ignorance, offering insipid excuses and, ultimately, trying to reduce proof of their complicity with the U.S. torture/detention machinery to a mere bureaucratic oversight. As Brown tells it, this was simply a case where an "error in the earlier U.S. records search meant that these cases did not come to light."

Nevertheless, the Guardian reported on Monday, "Ministers are coming under growing pressure as officials made it clear they still could not be certain of the extent to which U.S. aircraft made use of British facilities when taking alleged terrorists to prisons where they were likely to be subjected to inhumane treatment."

Regardless of what comes to light, the case of Diego Garcia is uniquely instructive in what it has revealed of American and British collusion in the past. Long before the "war on terror," the story of Diego Garcia was a tragic symbol of imperial aggression.

As the British journalist John Pilger wrote in his book Freedom Next Time, "The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible."

[PDJane]

1. And it used some very, very, very,

undemocratic methods and has from the beginning....since, of course, the United States wanted that land "cleansed," which meant removing the entire population, British citizens every last person, to the slums of Mauritius. When the US air base took over, they brought third world workers with them instead of using indigenous help.

And yes, Britain was complicit.

It's a shameful story.

[EFerrari]

2. Kick to read later.

:(

[BelgianMadCow]

3. OTTG

with you

shameful
bmc