{"id":4110,"date":"2008-07-13T13:24:13","date_gmt":"2008-07-13T12:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=4110"},"modified":"2008-07-13T13:24:13","modified_gmt":"2008-07-13T12:24:13","slug":"scandal-of-diego-garcia-rendition-flights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/contributions\/scandal-of-diego-garcia-rendition-flights\/","title":{"rendered":"Scandal of Diego Garcia Rendition Flights"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Andy Worthington<\/a>\u00a0| This has been a bad week for the British government, in relation to two of the running sores of its foreign policy, both centred on the Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands \u2013 known collectively as the Chagos Islands \u2013 were shamefully cleared<\/a> 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 \u201cspecial relationship\u201d between the UK and the US, which involved the old empire facilitating its successor\u2019s global reach, in exchange for a significant discount on the UK\u2019s Trident nuclear missile programme.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019 forced removal \u2013 when official documents referred to them as \u201cTarzans or Men Fridays\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s mentality.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u201croyal prerogative\u201d to strike down their claims once more. Although the court of appeal reversed this decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders\u2019 right to return was \u201cone of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings,\u201d 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\u2019 fight was far from over.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a> put it, that \u201c[a]llowing the Chagossian islanders to go back to their Indian Ocean homes would be a \u2018precarious and costly\u2019 operation,\u201d and that \u201cthe United States had said that it would also present an \u2018unacceptable risk\u2019 to its base on Diego Garcia,\u201d David Miliband, the foreign secretary, delivered a short statement relating to the other scandal of Diego Garcia: its use for \u201cextraordinary rendition\u201d flights in the \u201cWar on Terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

After years of denials by the British government that rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, David Miliband admitted<\/a> 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. \u201cIn both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia,\u201d Miliband said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a safe bet that more revelations are forthcoming.<\/p>\n

In October 2003, Time<\/a> magazine ran an exclusive feature by Simon Elegant focusing on the imprisonment of Hambali, a \u201chigh-value detainee,\u201d who spent years in various secret CIA<\/span> prisons \u2013 including Diego Garcia \u2013 until he was transferred to Guant\u00c3\u00a1namo 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<\/span> officers during his research, he had \u201creceived concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the \u2018processing\u2019 of high-value detainees.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWe\u2019re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guant\u00c3\u00a1namo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,\u201d and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, \u201cThey\u2019re behind bars \u2026 we\u2019ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guant\u00c3\u00a1namo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

David Miliband\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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, \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Reprieve, the legal action charity that has spent several years investigating \u201cextraordinary rendition\u201d and secret prisons, responded<\/a> by pointing out that the British government \u201cintentionally failed to ask the right questions of the US, and accepted implausible US assurances at face value,\u201d 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 \u201cextraordinary rendition,\u201d which would make the UK complicit in the crime.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The British government faced a fresh barrage of criticism just three days later, when the Foreign Affairs Select Committee published its latest report (PDF<\/a>) on the Overseas Territories. With reference to Diego Garcia, the Committee declared that \u201cit 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

For good measure, the Committee also had harsh words about the government\u2019s treatment of the Chagossians, noting, \u201cWe conclude that there is a strong moral case for the UK permitting and supporting a return \u2026 for the Chagossians. The FCO<\/span> (Foreign Office) has argued that such a return would be unsustainable, but we find these arguments less than convincing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a> the foreign secretary for dismissing his concerns about \u201cextraordinary rendition\u201d when he first raised the issue last October. \u201cThe Foreign Secretary persistently gave me the brush-off. He said we could rely on US assurances,\u201d Tyrie said, adding, \u201cMy allegations were correct. The Foreign Secretary\u2019s brush-off was not just misplaced, it was a disgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reprieve was even more blunt, stating, \u201cThis 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\u2019s central role in the unjust rendition and detention of prisoners in the so-called \u2018War on Terror\u2019 cannot be hidden forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Andy is the author of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America\u2019s Illegal Prison<\/a> (published by Pluto Press\/the University of Michigan Press).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Andy Worthington\u00a0| This has been a bad week for the British government, in relation to two of the running sores of its foreign policy, both centred on the Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. \u00a0 Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands \u2013 known collectively as the Chagos Islands \u2013 were shamefully […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[92],"class_list":{"0":"post-4110","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-contributions","7":"tag-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}