[News] Scandal at Diego Garcia

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington07082008.html
July 8, 2008

Rendition Flights Strain US-UK Relations


Scandal at Diego Garcia

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

This has been a bad week for the British 
government, in relation to two of the running 
sores of its foreign policy, both centered on the 
Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands -- known 
collectively as the Chagos Islands -- were 
shamefully cleared of their existing population 
in the late 1960s, to make way for a US airbase 
on Diego Garcia itself. This was a manifestation 
of the “special relationship” between the UK and 
the US, which involved the old empire 
facilitating its successor’s global reach, in 
exchange for a significant discount on the UK’s nuclear missile programme.

Ever since, the exiled Chagossians have been 
attempting to regain access to their ancestral 
lands, but with limited success. Although 
successive British governments have toned down 
the racist rhetoric used at the time of the 
islanders’ forced removal -- when official 
documents referred to them as “Tarzans or Men 
Fridays” -- Diego Garcia and the Chagos Islands 
have remained at the forefront of a colonial 
mindset that has never quite been extirpated from 
the Foreign Office’s mentality.

Although the islanders won a stunning victory in 
the High Court in 2000, which ruled that their 
expulsion had been illegal, the government fought 
back in 2003, when Prime Minster Tony Blair 
invoked an ancient and archaic “royal 
prerogative” to strike down their claims once 
more. Although the court of appeal reversed this 
decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders’ 
right to return was “one of the most fundamental 
liberties known to human beings,” it was clear 
that, in the struggle between a group of cruelly 
disposed islanders on the one hand, and the US 
military-industrial complex on the other, the 
Chagossians’ fight was far from over.

Last week, just after a party of Chagossians 
visited London to hear lawyers for the Foreign 
Office appealing in the House of Lords against 
the 2006 verdict and claiming, as the Guardian 
put it, that “[a]llowing the Chagossian islanders 
to go back to their Indian Ocean homes would be a 
‘precarious and costly’ operation,” and that “the 
United States had said that it would also present 
an ‘unacceptable risk’ to its base on Diego 
Garcia,” David Miliband, the foreign secretary, 
delivered a short statement relating to the other 
scandal of Diego Garcia: its use for 
“extraordinary rendition” flights in the “War on Terror.”

After years of denials by the British government 
that rendition flights had passed through Diego 
Garcia, David Miliband admitted in February that 
he had just been informed by his US counterparts 
that, upon searching their records, they had 
discovered that two flights had stopped on Diego 
Garcia in 2002. “In both cases a US plane with a 
single detainee on board refuelled at the US 
facility in Diego Garcia,” Miliband said. “The 
detainees did not leave the plane, and the US 
Government has assured us that no US detainees 
have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US 
investigations show no record of any other 
rendition through Diego Garcia or any other 
Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.”

At the time, I noted that this appeared to be a 
sly form of damage limitation, as there was 
compelling evidence that, far from being used on 
just two occasions as a transit point, the island 
had actually housed a secret prison. Three 
examples will suffice for now, although it’s a 
safe bet that more revelations are forthcoming.

In October 2003, Time magazine ran an exclusive 
feature by Simon Elegant focusing on the 
imprisonment of Hambali, a “high-value detainee,” 
who spent years in various secret CIA prisons -- 
including Diego Garcia -- until he was 
transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. 
Other evidence came from Council of Europe 
investigator (and Swiss senator) Dick Marty, who 
reported in June 2006 that, having spoken to 
senior CIA officers during his research, he had 
“received concurring confirmations that United 
States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is 
the international legal responsibility of the UK, 
in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees.’”

The final piece of evidence came from inside the 
US administration itself, when Barry McCaffrey, a 
retired four-star US general, and currently a 
professor of international security studies at 
the West Point military academy, let slip on two 
occasions that Diego Garcia had housed a secret 
prison. In May 2004, he blithely declared, “We’re 
probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, 
Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 
camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he 
slipped the leash again, saying, “They’re behind 
bars 
 we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

David Miliband’s statement last Thursday did 
nothing to suggest that the British government 
had any intention of pushing the matter further 
with its US allies, even though, as the sovereign 
power in charge of the islands, the ministers are 
unable to evade responsibility for what has taken place on Diego Garcia.

Rather feebly, the foreign secretary stated that, 
after sending a list of possible rendition 
flights that may have passed through British 
territory to the US authorities, “The United 
States Government confirmed that, with the 
exception of two cases related to Diego Garcia in 
2002, there have been no other instances in which 
US intelligence flights landed in the United 
Kingdom, our Overseas Territories, or the Crown 
Dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

Reprieve, the legal action charity that has spent 
several years investigating “extraordinary 
rendition” and secret prisons, responded by 
pointing out that the British government 
“intentionally failed to ask the right questions 
of the US, and accepted implausible US assurances 
at face value,” noting that the Foreign Office 
had declined to ask the US government for the 
names of the prisoners transported via Diego 
Garcia in 2002, that it had failed to ask if any 
other rendition flights had passed through Diego 
Garcia, even if, as the US asserted, no other 
planes landed there, and had also failed to ask 
whether any other flights passed through UK 
territory en route to engaging in “extraordinary 
rendition,” which would make the UK complicit in the crime.

The British government faced a fresh barrage of 
criticism just three days later, when the Foreign 
Affairs Select Committee published its latest 
report on the Overseas Territories. With 
reference to Diego Garcia, the Committee declared 
that “it is deplorable that previous US 
assurances about rendition flights have turned 
out to be false. The failure of the United States 
Administration to tell the truth resulted in the 
UK Government inadvertently misleading our Select 
Committee and the House of Commons. We intend to 
examine further the extent of UK supervision of 
US activities on Diego Garcia, including all 
flights and ships serviced from Diego Garcia.”

For good measure, the Committee also had harsh 
words about the government’s treatment of the 
Chagossians, noting, “We conclude that there is a 
strong moral case for the UK permitting and 
supporting a return ... for the Chagossians. The 
FCO (Foreign Office) has argued that such a 
return would be unsustainable, but we find these 
arguments less than convincing.”

Under pressure on two fronts over Diego Garcia, 
it remains to be seen whether the government can 
once more worm its way out of trouble. Tory MP 
Andrew Tyrie, who chairs the all-party 
parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, 
is keen not to let this happen. Speaking after 
the report was published, he chastised the 
foreign secretary for dismissing his concerns 
about “extraordinary rendition” when he first 
raised the issue last October. “The Foreign 
Secretary persistently gave me the brush-off. He 
said we could rely on US assurances,” Tyrie said, 
adding, “My allegations were correct. The Foreign 
Secretary's brush-off was not just misplaced, it was a disgrace.”

Reprieve was even more blunt, stating, “This 
remains a transatlantic cover-up of epic 
proportions. While the British government seems 
content to accept whatever nonsense it is fed by 
its US allies, the sordid truth about Diego 
Garcia’s central role in the unjust rendition and 
detention of prisoners in the so-called ‘War on 
Terror’ cannot be hidden forever.”

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the 
author of 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published 
by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk

He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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