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Guantanamo's Ghosts: The Shame of Diego Garcia

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Counterpunch - Oct 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington10202007.html


Guant!namo's Ghosts:

The Shame of Diego Garcia

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

One of the more sordid and long-running stories in Anglo-American
colonial history -- that of Diego Garcia, the chief island of the
Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean -- reared its ugly head again on
Friday when the UK's all-party foreign affairs committee announced
plans to investigate long-standing allegations that the CIA has, since
2002, held and interrogated al-Qaeda suspects at a secret prison on the
island.

The shameful tale of Diego Garcia began in 1961, when it was marked out
by the US military as a crucial geopolitical base. Ignoring the fact
that 2,000 people already lived there, and that the island -- a British
colony since the fall of Napoleon -- had been settled in the late 18th
century by French coconut planters, who shipped in African- and
Indian-born laborers from Mauritius, establishing what John Pilger
called "a gentle Creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a
hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation,"
the Labor government of Harold Wilson conspired with the
administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to "sweep" and
"sanitize" the islands (the words come from American documents that
were later declassified).

Although many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, a
British Foreign Office official wrote in 1966 that the government's aim
was "to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term,
temporary residents," so that they could be exiled to Mauritius. Having
removed the "Tarzans or Men Fridays," as another British memo described
the inhabitants, the British effectively ceded control of the islands
to the Americans, who established a base on Diego Garcia, which, over
the years, has become known as "Camp Justice," complete with "over
2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite
spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course." So thoroughly
were the islands cleared, and so stealthy the procedure, that in the
1970s the British Ministry of Defence had the effrontery to insist,
"There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation."

Suffering in exile, the Chagos islanders have struggled in vain to
secure the right to return to their ancestral home, winning a stunning
victory in the High Court in 2000, which ruled their expulsion illegal,
but then suffering a setback in 2003, when, with typically high-handed
authoritarianism, Tony Blair invoked an ancient and archaic "royal
prerogative" to strike down their claims once more. Although the appeal
court 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 remains to be seen how this belated judicial
recognition of their rights can be squared with the Americans'
insistence that their military-industrial archipelago must remain
unsullied by outsiders.

In their resistance to the islanders' claims, Blair and the Foreign
Office were clearly protecting the interests of their American allies,
for whom the geopolitical importance of Diego Garcia as a strategic
base had recently been augmented by its use, and the use of some of the
ships moored there, as fabulously remote offshore prisons in which to
hold and interrogate "high-value" al-Qaeda suspects.

The suspicion, which the foreign affairs committee has pledged to
investigate, is that on Diego Garcia the Americans found a far more
compliant partner in torture -- the British government -- than they
found in most other locations chosen for secret CIA prisons. According
to various reports over the years, the Americans' other partners in the
offshore torture game -- Thailand, Poland and Rumania, for example --
were only prepared to be paid off for a while before they got cold feet
and sent the CIA packing.

Whether the committee will probe deeply or not remains to be seen. The
British-based legal charity Reprieve, which has called for such an
investigation for some time, has already told the committee in a
submission that it believes that the British government is "potentially
systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of
disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention." Clive
Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, told the Guardian that he is
"absolutely and categorically certain" that prisoners have been held on
the island.

When questioned by diligent MPs like Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP
for Chichester, who is a staunch opponent of the CIA's use of
"extraordinary rendition," the British government has persistently
maintained that it believes "assurances" given by the US government
that no terror suspects have been held on the island, but there are
several compelling reasons for concluding, instead, that the government
is actually being economical with the truth.

Studies of planes used by the CIA for its rendition program have
established that on September 11, 2002, the day that 9/11 plotter Ramzi
bin al-Shibh was seized after a firefight in Karachi, one of the CIA's
planes flew from Washington to Diego Garcia, via Athens. Bin al-Shibh
did not resurface again until September 2006, when he was moved to
Guant!namo, and he has not spoken about his experiences. Unlike his
supposed mentor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he refused to take part in his
tribunal at Guant!namo earlier this year, but this is not the only
piece of the torture jigsaw that has been reconstructed by diligent
researchers.

In June 2006, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who produced a detailed
report on "extraordinary rendition" for the Council of Europe, also
concluded that Diego Garcia had been used as a secret prison. Having
spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he told the European
Parliament, "We have 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."

Anecdotally, Marty's findings have been confirmed by other sources.
Manfred Novak, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture, declared that he
heard from "reliable sources" that the US has "held prisoners on ships
in the Indian Ocean," and detainees in Guant!namo have also told their
lawyers that they were held on US ships  in addition to those held on
the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu, which are discussed in my book The
Guant!namo Files. One detainee told a researcher from Reprieve, "One of
my fellow prisoners in Guant!namo was at sea on an American ship with
about 50 others before coming to Guant!namo. He told me that there were
about 50 other people on the ship; they were all closed off in the
bottom. The people detained on the ship were beaten even more severely
than in Guant!namo."

The most incriminating evidence of all, however, has come not from
opponents of Guant!namo, or, indirectly, from those subjected to some
of the regime's most horrendous abuses, but from an upstanding insider.
Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor
of international security studies at the West Point military academy,
has twice let slip that Diego Garcia has, as the administration's
opponents have struggled to maintain, been used to hold terror
suspects. In May 2004, he blithely declared, "We're probably holding
around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia,
Guant!namo, 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 Guant!namo."

Do we need any further proof?

[Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The
Guant!namo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal
Prison' (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007). He can be
reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk ]

 


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