Where in the World Is Diego Garcia?

by Borgna Brunner

Few could accuse you of ignorance for never having heard of Diego Garcia—much less for not knowing that it's not a person but an island. Along with such obscure, `far-flung` places as Fogo Island off the West Coast of Africa and Pukapuka in the South Pacific, Diego Garcia isn't the sort of place to come tripping off the tongue of even the most geographically sophisticated.

There are times, however, when the U.S. military considers this `17-square`-mile atoll of coral and sand in the middle of the Indian Ocean one of the most valuable places on Earth.

A British dependency, Diego Garcia was developed as a joint U.S.-UK air and naval refueling and support station during the cold war. Located in the middle of the Indian Ocean and out of cyclone range, it was ideal for keeping an eye on the Soviet Union.

Diego Garcia proved to be critically important as a refueling base during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and during Operation Desert Fox, it served as a base for `B-52` bombers, which on Dec. 17, 1998, launched nearly 100 `long-range` cruise missiles aimed at Iraq. Beginning on Oct. 7, 2001, the United States again used Diego Garcia when it launched `B-1` and `B-52` bomber attacks against Afghanistan, in retaliation for the Taliban's harboring of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Currently, a number of `al-Qaeda` suspects are being held and interrogated on the island. Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin), the leader of the Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, responsible for the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, is currently being held on the island. During the 2003 British and `American-led` war against Iraq, the Diego Garcia once again played a crucial strategic role.

[IMG]http://www.`left-turn`.net/images/dgmap.gif[/IMG]

The fact that Diego Garcia is more than 3,000 miles south of Iraq, and just a shade closer to Afghanistan, did not pose the logistical problem one might expect. According to the U.S. Air Force, `B-52s` have an "unrefueled combat range in excess of 8,800 miles." (During the Gulf War, `B-52s` took off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, launched cruise missiles on Iraq, and returned to Barksdale 35 hours later—the longest `non-stop` combat mission in the history of the `B-52`.)

The Portuguese explored Diego Garcia in the 1500s; between 1814 and 1965 it was a dependency of Mauritius. It then became part of the Chagos Archipelago, which belonged to the newly created British Indian Ocean Territory. The island remains a British dependency today.

Although Diego Garcia once had a small native population, the inhabitants, known as the Ilois, or the Chagossians, were forced to relocate (1967–1973) so that the island could be turned into a military base—over the strong protestations of other Indian Ocean islands, who objected to having cruise missiles as neighbors.

Most of the displaced Ilois were agricultural workers and fisherman. Uprooted and robbed of their livelihood, the Ilois now live in poverty in Mauritius's urban slums, more than 1,000 miles from their homeland. A smaller number were deported to the Seychelles. In 2000, a British court ruled that the order to evacuate Diego Garcia's inhabitants was invalid, but the court also upheld the island's military status, which permits only personnel authorized by the military to inhabit the island. The Ilois sued the British government for compensation and the right to repatriation, but in Oct. 2003 a British judge ruled that although the Ilois had been treated "shamefully" by the government, their claims were unfounded. The Ilois are expected to appeal.

Source:
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/dg.html

What In The World Is Diego Garcia?

There's one territory that doesn't make any trouble about being used for U.S. air strikes against Iraq -- a cloistered, `little-known` launching pad of an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia.

The Pentagon is using the tiny `horseshoe-shaped` atoll, which the U.S. is leasing from Great Britain, as a landing strip for `B-52` bombers.

Fly over Diego Garcia and it looks as if a `well-designed` `air-naval` base had risen from the sea. Down one prong runs a 12,`000-foot` airstrip, long enough for the lumbering `B-52s` and AWAC transports; the sheltered harbor is deep and broad enough to accommodate warships and nuclear submarines. The base is well within bombers' range of the Gulf and makes an ideal fueling stop for U.S. ships patrolling to the south should they be needed as reinforcements. Best of all, it's a base of operations where the natives can't say no.

At least not anymore. Upon acquiring the island, named for the Portuguese navigator who discovered it in 1532, from Mauritius in 1965 in a deal for that island nation's independence, the British government promptly leased the island to the U.S. military -- and then orchestrated a forced repatriation of Diego Garcia's native Ilois to Mauritius. Some Ilois committed suicide rather than be moved; those who survived fared poorly in their new home. They never stopped campaigning for their return -- and never got it. In 1982, Britain finally settled with the displaced islanders for $7 million.

For the last three decades, Diego Garcia has been inhabited solely by -- and open only to -- U.S. servicemen and a token contingent of British administrators. In the late '70s it was home to Jimmy Carter's Delta Force; in the early '80s, Ronald Reagan built the base into a key outpost while the `Iran-Iraq` war raged and the U.S. and the Soviet Union vied for supremacy in Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. At a time when the alliances of local nations were for sale and often swung wildly, Diego Garcia was blissfully free of political turmoil.

The U.S. guards this strategic jewel closely. Aside from a brief tour allowed in 1976 while Carter made noises about "demilitarizing" the region, nary a journalist has set foot on the island -- a Newsweek writer's dateline from that trip was wryly datelined "Somewhere East of Suez." Construction and maintenance of the base's communications equipment, fuel facilities and military hardware is done strictly by military contractors, and inventories of that weaponry is classified. With no civilians allowed, Diego Garcia remains the loneliest military outpost in the world.

For U.S. servicemen, just getting to Diego from the States is a lesson in the value of maintaining a political oasis in the region. A Navy advisory reminds travelers that numerous refueling stops "may be in countries where our presence is internationally sensitive... No clothing, hats or belt buckles with slogans or insignia which may draw attention to your status as an American citizen/military member may be worn. This is required for your personal safety." Those who do arrive, however, are privy to something of a Club Med for men in uniform.

No wonder that presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush all ignored plaintive demands by Mauritian government that the island be returned to its sovereignty. It served Bush well as a staging area during the Gulf War, and President Clinton has earmarked it as a politically insulated base for `long-range`, `missile-laden` `B-52` sorties and, if necessary, the `B-1` bombers that would be grounded in Bahrain. "As a `long-range` base, Diego is perfect," says TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. "It's convenient, it's isolated and you don't have to deal with recalcitrant allies or terrorist attacks. It's an immovable aircraft carrier."

Source:
Time.com

Red Cross suspects U.S. prisoner stash

By Naomi Koppel
ASSOCIATED PRESS

GENEVA — The international Red Cross said yesterday it suspects the United States is hiding detainees in lockups across the globe, though the agency has been granted access to thousands of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

Terror suspects reported by the FBI as captured have never turned up in detention centers, and the United States has failed to reply to agency demands for a list of everyone it's holding, Antonella Notari, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in an interview with the Associated Press.

"These people are, as far as we can tell, detained in locations that are undisclosed not only to us but also to the rest of the world," Mrs. Notari said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday he was "looking further into" the Red Cross concerns and added: "We do work closely with the Red Cross on all detainee issues." He did not concede a problem exists.

At the Pentagon, spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "The International Committee of the Red Cross has access to all Defense Department detention operations."

However, in his report into claims of abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that military police there had "routinely held persons brought to them by other government agencies without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention."

On at least one occasion, they moved these "ghost detainees" around the prison to hide them from a visiting Red Cross delegation, he said in the report. He described the actions as "deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law."

Under the Geneva Conventions, the United States is obliged to give the neutral, `Swiss-run` ICRC access to prisoners of war and other detainees to check on their conditions and allow them to send messages to their families.

The United States says it is cooperating with the agency, and has allowed Red Cross delegates access to thousands of prisoners in Afghanistan, at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq, where agency delegates have even visited Saddam Hussein.

It is not clear whether terror suspects would be covered by the Geneva Conventions, but Mrs. Notari said that "for humanitarian reasons" the Red Cross should be told about all detainees.

ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger made the request in January on a visit to Washington during which he met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

"So far we haven't had a satisfactory reply," Mrs. Notari said.

She said the FBI has posted details of arrested suspects on its Web site, and other arrests have been reported by the media, but some of those people have never shown up in prisons that the Red Cross visits.

Mrs. Notari said she had read media reports that some people are being held at Diego Garcia, a `British-held` island in the Indian Ocean that the United States uses as a strategic military base, but the ICRC has not been notified of any prisoners there.

ICRC delegates visited nearly 500,000 detainees in around 80 countries last year, including almost 11,000 in Iraq.

In an interview in yesterday's edition of the German business daily Handelsblatt, Mr. Kellenberger defended the ICRC's policy of refusing to comment publicly on the conditions that it finds in places of detention, preferring to negotiate directly with the authorities.

The agency faced criticism for not speaking out about the abuse at Abu Ghraib until it was revealed in the media.

"Certain people had the impression that our repeated, confidential approaches to the U.S. authorities were falling flat," Mr. Kellenberger said.

"But impressions can be wrong. When we visited Abu Ghraib in January 2004, we found improvements compared with October 2003, and when we visited in March it was better than in January."

The ICRC has, however, spoken out on its concerns over the continued detention without trial of prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba.

"I made it clear in January that we were not happy with the improvements," Mr. Kellenberger said. "The most recent visit has just finished. We must now study the findings."

Source:
http://snipurl.com/63jo

[quote]

U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations;
'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities

Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, Washington Post Staff Writers

December 26, 2002

Deep inside the forbidden zone at the U.S.-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on terrorism -- captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders.

Those who refuse to cooperate inside this secret CIA interrogation center are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or `spray-painted` goggles, according to intelligence specialists familiar with CIA interrogation methods. At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a `24-hour` bombardment of lights -- subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques.

Those who cooperate are rewarded with creature comforts, interrogators whose methods include feigned friendship, respect, cultural sensitivity and, in some cases, money. Some who do not cooperate are turned over -- "rendered," in official parlance -- to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture has been documented by the U.S. government and human rights organizations.

In the multifaceted global war on terrorism waged by the Bush administration, one of the most opaque -- yet vital -- fronts is the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. U.S. officials have said little publicly about the captives' names, numbers or whereabouts, and virtually nothing about interrogation methods. But interviews with several former intelligence officials and 10 current U.S. national security officials -- including several people who witnessed the handling of prisoners -- provide insight into how the U.S. government is prosecuting this part of the war.

The picture that emerges is of a `brass-knuckled` quest for information, often in concert with allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred.

While the U.S. government publicly denounces the use of torture, each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary. They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view. The CIA, which has primary responsibility for interrogations, declined to comment.

"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA.."

The `off-limits` patch of ground at Bagram is one of a number of secret detention centers overseas where U.S. due process does not apply, according to several U.S. and European national security officials, where the CIA undertakes or manages the interrogation of suspected terrorists. Another is Diego Garcia, a somewhat `horseshoe-shaped` island in the Indian Ocean that the United States leases from Britain.

U.S. officials oversee most of the interrogations, especially those of the most senior captives. In some cases, highly trained CIA officers question captives through interpreters. In others, the intelligence agency undertakes a "false flag" operation using fake decor and disguises meant to deceive a captive into thinking he is imprisoned in a country with a reputation for brutality, when, in reality, he is still in CIA hands. Sometimes, female officers conduct interrogations, a psychologically jarring experience for men reared in a conservative Muslim culture where women are never in control.

In other cases, usually involving `lower-level` captives, the CIA hands them to foreign intelligence services -- notably those of Jordan, Egypt and Morocco -- with a list of questions the agency wants answered. These "extraordinary renditions" are done without resort to legal process and usually involve countries with security services known for using brutal means.

According to U.S. officials, nearly 3,000 suspected al Qaeda members and their supporters have been detained worldwide since Sept. 11, 2001. About 625 are at the U.S. military's confinement facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some officials estimated that fewer than 100 captives have been rendered to third countries. Thousands have been arrested and held with U.S. assistance in countries known for brutal treatment of prisoners, the officials said.

At a Sept. 26 joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees, Cofer Black, then head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, spoke cryptically about the agency's new forms of "operational flexibility" in dealing with suspected terrorists. "This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11," Black said. "After 9/11 the gloves come off."

According to one official who has been directly involved in rendering captives into foreign hands, the understanding is, "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." Some countries are known to use `mind-altering` drugs such as sodium pentathol, said other officials involved in the process.

Abu Zubaida, who is believed to be the most important al Qaeda member in detention, was shot in the groin during his apprehension in Pakistan in March. National security officials suggested that Zubaida's painkillers were used selectively in the beginning of his captivity. He is now said to be cooperating, and his information has led to the apprehension of other al Qaeda members.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment earlier this week on CIA or `intelligence-related` matters. But, he said: "The United States is treating enemy combatants in U.S. government control, wherever held, humanely and in a manner consistent with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949."

The convention outlined the standards for treatment of prisoners of war. Suspected terrorists in CIA hands have not been accorded POW status.

Other U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that interrogators deprive some captives of sleep, a practice with ambiguous status in international law.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the authoritative interpreter of the international Convention Against Torture, has ruled that lengthy interrogation may incidentally and legitimately cost a prisoner sleep. But when employed for the purpose of breaking a prisoner's will, sleep deprivation "may in some cases constitute torture."

The State Department's annual human rights report routinely denounces sleep deprivation as an interrogation method. In its 2001 report on Turkey, Israel and Jordan, all U.S. allies, the department listed sleep deprivation among `often-used` alleged torture techniques.

U.S. officials who defend the renditions say the prisoners are sent to these third countries not because of their coercive questioning techniques, but because of their cultural affinity with the captives. Besides being illegal, they said, torture produces unreliable information from people who are desperate to stop the pain. They look to foreign allies more because their intelligence services can develop a culture of intimacy that Americans cannot. They may use interrogators who speak the captive's Arabic dialect and often use the prospects of shame and the reputation of the captive's family to goad the captive into talking.

In a speech on Dec. 11, CIA director George J. Tenet said that interrogations overseas have yielded significant returns recently. He calculated that worldwide efforts to capture or kill terrorists had eliminated about `one-third` of the al Qaeda leadership. "Almost half of our successes against senior al Qaeda members has come in recent months," he said.

Many of these successes have come as a result of information gained during interrogations. The capture of al Qaeda leaders Ramzi Binalshibh in Pakistan, Omar `al-Faruq` in Indonesia, Abd `al-Rahim` `al-Nashiri` in Kuwait and Muhammad al Darbi in Yemen were all partly the result of information gained during interrogations, according to U.S. intelligence and national security officials. All four remain under CIA control.

Time, rather than technique, has produced the most helpful information, several national security and intelligence officials said. Using its global computer database, the CIA is able to quickly check leads from captives in one country with information divulged by captives in another.

"We know so much more about them now than we did a year ago -- the personalities, how the networks are established, what they think are important targets, how they think we will react," said retired Army general Wayne Downing, the Bush administration's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism until he resigned in June.

"The interrogations of Abu Zubaida drove me nuts at times," Downing said. "He and some of the others are very clever guys. At times I felt we were in a classic `counter-interrogation` class: They were telling us what they think we already knew. Then, what they thought we wanted to know. As they did that, they fabricated and weaved in threads that went nowhere. But, even with these ploys, we still get valuable information and they are off the street, unable to plot and coordinate future attacks."

In contrast to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where military lawyers, news reporters and the Red Cross received occasional access to monitor prisoner conditions and treatment, the CIA's overseas interrogation facilities are `off-limits` to outsiders, and often even to other government agencies. In addition to Bagram and Diego Garcia, the CIA has other secret detention centers overseas, and often uses the facilities of foreign intelligence services.

Free from the scrutiny of military lawyers steeped in the international laws of war, the CIA and its intelligence service allies have the leeway to exert physically and psychologically aggressive techniques, said national security officials and U.S. and European intelligence officers.

Although no direct evidence of mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody has come to light, the prisoners are denied access to lawyers or organizations, such as the Red Cross, that could independently assess their treatment. Even their names are secret.

This month, the U.S. military announced that it had begun a criminal investigation into the handling of two prisoners who died in U.S. custody at the Bagram base. A base spokesman said autopsies found one of the detainees died of a pulmonary embolism, the other of a heart attack.

Al Qaeda suspects are seldom taken without force, and some suspects have been wounded during their capture. After apprehending suspects, U.S. `take-down` teams -- a mix of military special forces, FBI agents, CIA case officers and local allies -- aim to disorient and intimidate them on the way to detention facilities.

According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often "softened up" by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner's resistance.

The `take-down` teams often "package" prisoners for transport, fitting them with hoods and gags, and binding them to stretchers with duct tape.

Bush administration appointees and career national security officials acknowledged that, as one of them put it, "our guys may kick them around a little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath." Another said U.S. personnel are scrupulous in providing medical care to captives, adding in a deadpan voice, that "pain control [in wounded patients] is a very subjective thing."

The CIA's participation in the interrogation of rendered terrorist suspects varies from country to country.

"In some cases [involving interrogations in Saudi Arabia], we're able to observe through `one-way` mirrors the live investigations," said a senior U.S. official involved in Middle East security issues. "In others, we usually get summaries. We will feed questions to their investigators. They're still very much in control."

The official added: "We're not aware of any torture or even physical abuse."

Tenet acknowledged the Saudis' role in his Dec. 11 speech. "The Saudis are proving increasingly important support to our counterterrorism efforts -- from making arrests to sharing debriefing results," he said.

But Saudi Arabia is also said to withhold information that might lead the U.S. government to conclusions or policies that the Saudi royal family fears. U.S. teams, for that reason, have sometimes sent Saudi nationals to Egypt instead.

Jordan is a favored country for renditions, several U.S. officials said. The Jordanians are considered "highly professional" interrogators, which some officials said meant that they do not use torture. But the State Department's 2001 human rights report criticized Jordan and its General Intelligence Directorate for arbitrary and unlawful detentions and abuse.

"The most frequently alleged methods of torture include sleep deprivation, beatings on the soles of the feet, prolonged suspension with ropes in contorted positions and extended solitary confinement," the 2001 report noted. Jordan also is known to use prisoners' family members to induce suspects to talk.

Another significant destination for rendered suspects is Morocco, whose general intelligence service has sharply stepped up cooperation with the United States. Morocco has a documented history of torture, as well as longstanding ties to the CIA..

The State Department's human rights report says Moroccan law "prohibits torture, and the government claims that the use of torture has been discontinued; however, some members of the security forces still tortured or otherwise abused detainees."

In at least one case, U.S. operatives led the capture and transfer of an al Qaeda suspect to Syria, which for years has been near the top of U.S. lists of human rights violators and sponsors of terrorism. The German government strongly protested the move. The suspect, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, holds joint German and Syrian citizenship. It could not be learned how much of Zammar's interrogation record Syria has provided the CIA.

The Bush administration maintains a legal distance from any mistreatment that occurs overseas, officials said, by denying that torture is the intended result of its rendition policy. American teams, officials said, do no more than assist in the transfer of suspects who are wanted on criminal charges by friendly countries. But five officials acknowledged, as one of them put it, "that sometimes a friendly country can be invited to 'want' someone we grab." Then, other officials said, the foreign government will charge him with a crime of some sort.

One official who has had direct involvement in renditions said he knew they were likely to be tortured. "I . . . do it with my eyes open," he said.

According to present and former officials with firsthand knowledge, the CIA's authoritative Directorate of Operations instructions, drafted in cooperation with the general counsel, tells case officers in the field that they may not engage in, provide advice about or encourage the use of torture by cooperating intelligence services from other countries.

"Based largely on the Central American human rights experience," said Fred Hitz, former CIA inspector general, "we don't do torture, and we can't countenance torture in terms of we can't know of it." But if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations, "we can use the fruits of it."

Bush administration officials said the CIA, in practice, is using a narrow definition of what counts as "knowing" that a suspect has been tortured. "If we're not there in the room, who is to say?" said one official conversant with recent reports of renditions.

The Clinton administration pioneered the use of extraordinary rendition after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But it also pressed allied intelligence services to respect lawful boundaries in interrogations.

After years of fruitless talks in Egypt, President Bill Clinton cut off funding and cooperation with the directorate of Egypt's general intelligence service, whose torture of suspects has been a perennial theme in State Department human rights reports.

"You can be sure," one Bush administration official said, "that we are not spending a lot of time on that now."

Staff writers Bob Woodward, Susan Schmidt and Douglas Farah, and correspondent Peter Finn in Berlin, contributed to this report[/quote]

[quote]

Abuse scandal shines spotlight on US network of secret jails

Roland Watson
May 14, 2004, Friday

Activists claim that the rough treatment of detainees is an officially sanctioned policy, reports Roland Watson.

FROM steel cages on the eastern tip of Cuba to shipping containers outside Kabul and tents at Baghdad airport, US forces are holding more than 9,000 prisoners from post September 11 conflicts.

Yet one of the lessons of the Abu Ghraib scandal is how little is known about who they are, why they are being held, where, and in what conditions.

As more details emerge about what lay behind the regime at Abu Ghraib, however, a pattern can be discerned.

"The focus on Abu Ghraib, while horrific abuses were conducted there, is misplaced because this is systematic throughout the system of detainee facilities," Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch said. "We don't know where all the detainees are. But the extent of abuses that we have documented is proof positive that these are not isolated incidents confined to one prison block in Iraq."

Ms Bogert likened the detention facilities, where detainees are being held indefinitely, without charge or access to a lawyer, to a sprawling gulag.

Human Rights Watch called on the US military to release immediately all records of investigations into abuse at detention facilities, including those into the deaths of three prisoners in Afghanistan.

A lawyer for David Hicks, one of the Australian detainees at Guantanamo Bay, said his client had been criminally abused as part of an officially sanctioned policy.

Stephen Kenny said: "These abuses were not simply the excesses of individual guards."

Official facts about the detainees who have been taken into US custody since 9/11 are hard to come by. The Pentagon said yesterday that 8,000 were being held in Iraq and 595 at Guantanamo Bay.

But a spokesman said he could not provide a figure for Afghanistan because it was classified. The International Committee of the Red Cross is allowed to visit the 300 Afghans held at Bagram airbase outside Kabul. But no one knows how many other detainees are held at US bases outside Kandahar, and at Gardez and Khost.

There is then the highly secret network of "undisclosed locations" around the world where "high value" detainees such as the `al-Qaeda` masterminds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida are held. Neither the Pentagon nor the Central Intelligence Agency admits their existence. "I'm not aware of any other locations," a Pentagon spokesman said.

The British Government has denied that Diego Garcia, the British island in the Indian Ocean used as an air force base, is used to house prisoners from the war on terrorism.

Other reported locations for such "phantom facilities" include Guam, Thailand, the US airbase in Qatar and US naval brigs. The CIA could also hand over prisoners to allies such as Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, where detainees can face rougher treatment.

A military report into abuses at Abu Ghraib talks of "ghost detainees" brought in by the CIA, who were moved around the prison to avoid Red Cross teams.

The common factor, including Guantanamo and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, is that they are all beyond the reach of any legal system. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib has highlighted a series of fundamental changes in the way the US treats prisoners, both rhetorical and practical.

In January 2002, amid international uproar that detainees at Guantanamo Bay were to be held outside the Geneva Conventions, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said: "I do not feel even the slightest concern about their treatment.

They are being treated vastly better than they treated anybody else."

Critics say the official `high-handedness`, and the impression that "normal rules did not apply", trickled down through the ranks.

The Pentagon and the CIA both approved harsher rules for the interrogation of detainees after 9/11. Under the changes, the CIA may use "enhanced measures" which could cause temporary physical or mental pain. Its officials refused to comment on claims that interrogators subjected Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to "water boarding", when a detainee's head is forced under water until he is persuaded that he may drown.

The Pentagon also drew up a list of 50 approved interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, extreme hot or cold temperatures, isolation and putting prisoners in "stress positions" for up to 45 minutes. In both cases, interrogators require written permission from Washington. But critics suggest that such details were overlooked or ignored.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have now been advised by their superiors to step out of the room during some `CIA-led` interrogations as senior officials in the US Justice Department fear that some of the techniques used could compromise the FBI agents in any subsequent criminal cases.

There is a direct link between Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib in the form of `Major-General` Geoffrey Miller. At Guantanamo General Miller is credited with increasing the flow of intelligence received from inmates.

He was sent to Iraq in the autumn of last year and made two changes that had a significant impact on the later abuses. He gave Military Intelligence officers greater authority in the prison to the extent that the commanding officer, Janis Karpinski, a reservist `Brigadier-General`, said that she no longer had control.

General Miller's changes also allowed prison guards to participate in gathering intelligence. Ironically, it was to General Miller that the Pentagon turned last month in an effort to rebuild the chain of command at Abu Ghraib.

When three Britons returned home after spending two years at Guantanamo Bay, they complained of being stripped, hooded and beaten. They also described sexual humiliation and degradation. The stories seemed `far-fetched` at the time, but since Abu Ghraib, no longer.


[/quote]

BRITAIN'S ISLAND IN THE SUN BECOMES BLAIR'S LATEST PROBLEM IN TORTURE SCANDAL

by Gordon Thomas

Tony Blair will face further embarrassing questions over the torture
scandal as to why the government permitted the CIA and the US Department of Defence to operate a `top-secret` interrogation centre on Diego Garcia, a tiny and remote British Crown colony in the Indian Ocean.

High level leaders and operatives of al Qaeda and the Taliban are held
there. None are protected by the Geneva Convention. Last week, FBI
director Robert Mueller said the interrogation techniques used by the CIA
interrogators "violate all American `anti-torture` laws and would be
prohibited in criminal cases of the most serious kind".

The interrogation techniques used on Diego Garcia are contained in a
secret CIA manual on coercive questioning. It contains sections headed
"Threats and Fear", "Pain", "Narcosis" and "Heightened Suggestibility and
Hypnosis".

The presence of the prisoners on Diego Garcia is so secret that a
`counter-terrorism` official in Washington said President Bush "had informed the CIA he did not want to know where they were".

The American interrogators have unfettered access to prisoners kept on
board prison ships in the island's `deep-water` harbours. They are brought
ashore for questioning in a `custom-built` concrete `cell-block` near the
island's air field. From there, US Air Force B52s took off to bomb
Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Now private Lear jets regularly fly in with new prisoners. Highly placed intelligence sources in Pakistan and Washington have revealed that over thirty al Qaeda suspects have been kidnapped by CIA snatch squads and flown to Diego Garcia in the chartered Lears.

Among them are Osama bin Laden's senior lieutenants, Khalid Sheik Mohammed Ramzi Binasshibh and Abu Zubaida, kidnapped from Pakistan.

One intelligence source said: "These operations are sanctioned in
Washington from the top. Rumsfeld knows. Sometimes the snatch flights are approved by the White House".

Alberto Gonzales, President Bush's `in-house` counsel, confirmed that "many key decisions about detainees and their status are made by the President".

Last week, Amnesty International wrote to William S Farish, the US
ambassador to Britain, to seek a meeting over claims that "stress and
duress tactics" are being used on Diego Garcia prisoners. And he wanted to know the role of "various foreign intelligence services known to torture
detainees who are also involved in the interrogations".

Both MI6 and Mossad agents are known to have visited Diego Garcia to question "high value" suspected terrorists.

Both Amnesty and the International Red Cross have been refused permission to visit the island under a secret deal made between London and Washington.

Secret legal opinions from US Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers have concluded that the CIA was "safe from scrutiny" if it conducted its
interrogations on places like Diego Garcia.

It is not known if those opinions were known to the UK government when the use of Diego Garcia as an interrogation centre was decided upon.

A key ruling states violations of American statutes that prohibit torture,
degrading treatment or the Geneva Convention will not apply "if it can be
argued that the detainees are formally in the custody of another country".

"As Diego Garcia is a British colony, it could mean that the prisoners
there are entitled to British protection", said a `counter-terrorism`
officer in Washington. He is one of those who has expressed concerns
inside the CIA over what is happening.

"If the Administration has nothing to hide, it should immediately end
incommunicado detention and grant access to independent human rights
organisations", sad Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty
International.

Human rights organisations fear that there are similar physical abuses at
Diego Garcia as were revealed in Baghdad's now notorious Abu Ghraib
prison.

Since February 1964 - following a still secret `Anglo-American` conference
in London - Diego Garcia has increasingly become what Washington calls "a staging base for the security of the West".

Hundreds of islanders, all British passport holders - who a Foreign Office
official noted in 1955 "are lavish with their Union Jacks" - were thrown
off Diego Garcia at short notice. But the coral limestone island is still
one of the British Indian Ocean Territories.

There are now 6,000 US military personnel living on the island - along
with their "high value" al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners.

They are part of more than 9,000 other detainees who are held in US
military controlled prisons specially set up for the purpose.

It has been established that 300 detainees are held in railroad `box-cars`
at Bagram, north of Kabul. Hundreds more are detained in prisons in
Afghanistan. But the majority are held in Iraq's thirteen jails.

Only what the CIA manual denotes as "the most difficult" are sent to Diego Garcia. The island was described as "one of the sites in friendly
countries around the world where al Qaeda operatives can be kept quietly
and securely", said a Washington intelligence officer.

The number of detainees on Diego Garcia are not known. But a senior
intelligence officer said that "there are no more than several hundred
held there. Many have been on Diego Garcia for over two years. Unlike the majority of detainees in Camp `X-Ray` in Guantanamo Bay, these prisoners still have important information to give.

Diego Garcia has been designed as the place where that information can be obtained".

One of those believed to be held there is Abu Zubaida, a senior member of al Qaeda. He was captured by Pakistani intelligence officers and handed over to the CIA. Hours later he was on Diego Garcia.

On November 3, 2000, the Foreign Office issued a new Immigration Ordinance order that ensured Diego Garcia island would remain "as secret a place as can be found on the planet", according to a US official.

Though the island has the same status as the Falkland Islands, no outsider is allowed to set foot on its soil. The islanders now live on Mauritius, 1,000 miles to the south, most existing in shanty towns near the harbours.

To ensure they have no "right of return", the 2000 edict states that
"nothing must place at risk vital military operations conducted on and
from Diego Garcia".

A clue to those operations is evident by the skyline of satellite towers,
`space-tracking` domes, oil and fuel dumps and the armada of military ships in the harbour.

There is a growing concern among human rights organisations that the "high value" prisoners are being interrogated under guidelines also approved by US General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander at Camp `X-Ray` in Guantanamo Bay. He is now in charge of Abu Gharib prison in Baghdad.

Shortly after the legal opinions were given on how the CIA could
interrogate, Miller was sent to Baghdad last August by the chairman of the
US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers to "recommend changes that would improve strategic interrogation".

Miller concluded that "detention operations must act as an enabler for
interrogations".

Source:
http://snipurl.com/aoyw

[quote]`K-US` secret deal on Diego Garcia for 2nd Guantanamo
6/30/2004 11:00:00 PM GMT

The British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia which belongs to Britain is being lined up in a joint US/UK project as a second Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

The recent history of Diego Garcia is one of abuse of the original inhabitants whom the British Government summarily threw out of their homes between 1967 and 1973 so the base could be leased to the US whom created a military base on the island. One British diplomat at the time described the islanders as "man Fridays" and "Tarzans".

Diego Garcia is highly important to the US in providing a secure base for the launch of attacks and surveillance in the Middle East and Afghanistan. It was used in both Iraq wars.

The US and UK are keen to create new secret detention facilities and Scottish MP Alex Salmon today accused British Prime Minister Tony Blair of a secret pact with the US to create a new Guantanamo Bay type of detention centre hidden from the world. The legal status of the base will be another "grey area" similar to Guantanamo.

In mid June the British Government barred thousands of islanders from returning to their homes which was in response to a English High court judgment four years ago that criticised the behaviour of previous British governments and opened the way for the islanders to go home.

At the time, the Foreign Office accepted the judge's decision and promised to embark on preparations for their return. But the Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell has now said it is not feasible for the islanders to go back and that, as a result of September 11, US defence needs have increased.

The new law disbars islanders returning not only to Diego Garcia, but to the other 64 outlying islands.

Alan Vincatassin, leader of British Indian Ocean Territory Islanders Movement, said last night: "It is totally horrendous and unacceptable. I am very angry. This law is the most barbarous I have seen in the name of the Queen.

"It is because the US wants to have these islands empty they [the Foreign Office] have removed the right of abode."

British Government Changes Law

Instead of using the normal legislative process, the Foreign Office was able to change the law by use of orders in council (privy council), a remnant of the once `all-powerful` royal prerogative.

The new order replaces the existing constitution of the territory and "makes clear, as a principle of the constitution, that no person has the right of abode in the territory or has unrestricted access to any part of it".

Richard Gifford, the `London-based` lawyer for the 4,500 islanders and their descendants seeking a right to return, said: "This is an absolute stab in the back. Not since the days of King John has anyone tried to expel British citizens from the realm by executive order."

http://tinyurl.com/52l55
[/quote]

The Torture System

by Tom Engelhardt

It's worth starting with the basics, because they are what you're likely to see the least of in the uproar at hand.

The system of injustice that, since 9/11, we've sent offshore and organized globally -- from Guantanamo, Cuba to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan -- is by its nature also a system of torture. It was designed from the beginning to be a Bermuda Triangle of injustice, existing in an extrajudicial darkness beyond "our" sight or oversight. There, on military bases and in special `military-controlled` prisons, the "war on terrorism" could be carried to its informational climax in whatever ways and by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had.

Whether in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, this developing `mini-gulag` was never meant to be a system of imprisonment for crimes -- hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for the purpose of information extraction (and possibly revenge).

The men (and woman) running the Bush administration's foreign policy in this period didn't have to specify the actual use of torture, though some of them seem to have done so. We know from the Sunday Washington Post that, in April 2003, after "debates" on the subject, Pentagon officials at "the highest levels" approved twenty "psychologically stressful" methods of interrogation, most or all of which any sane person would classify as torture, including the questioning of naked prisoners, and that these methods were later approved at least for "`high-value` detainees" in Iraq. In the meantime, there was a good deal of `post-9`/11 torture chatter in the media about how much of it we could, should, and would use in a war to the death against a fanatic enemy.

Both the President and his Pentagon chief claimed to be "shocked" or "disgusted" by the forms a torture system took -- by its look. Yes, they had been informed of what had happened at Abu Ghraib prison, but those, after all, were just words, months of words. The difference was the images on television and in the press. "We saw the pictures," said the President. "It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place," said his secretary of defense. "Words don't do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane, all of which is true, that it was blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You see the photographs and you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged."

That is in itself a kind of confession, if you consider it for a moment. You cannot help but be outraged. All those previous months from `mid-January` 2004 on, when he and his president assumedly only knew about the "words" (grim enough certainly in General Taguba's report), when they were, in the pungent phrase of Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "apprised orally," our secretary of defense and our President could evidently "help but be outraged." And that tells us a great deal.

They could, it seems, practice "deniability" not only on us but on themselves. Human beings are as capable of this as they are of turning into animals and torturing other human beings. But whatever deceptions they may have practiced on themselves, the simple fact is that the penal system they set up was a torture system. The Bush administration, while speaking loudly of bringing its version of democracy to the Middle East, was also eager, as Adam Hochschild wrote for Tomdispatch many months ago, to bring the developing "age of human rights" to a speedy end in the pursuit of what former CIA director and enthusiastic neocon James Woolsey liked to call "World War IV," which was imagined, like the Cold War, as a many decades long slog to victory in which only the toughest, those willing to wield brute power and commit the most difficult acts, would survive.

After all, it was, post 9/11, a `new-style` `bomb-shelter` world and we were planning on acting accordingly and -- so our leaders made clear -- to hell with international institutions and international norms, whether new (the International Criminal Court) or old (the Geneva Conventions). In this way, they set the tone for a world of torture on the `Single-Power` Planet of a military giant determined to have its own way and in documents like its National Security Strategy of 2002 said so in no uncertain terms. They determined the camera angles and set up the cameras, so to speak, but when the pictures came back they had no stomach for them. Words, that was another matter entirely.

From the beginning, this administration was never embarrassed by the words, by the news that did leak out from its black hole of injustice. That such a system was being developed was obvious to anyone who cared to look, or bothered to read even our own press closely, or consulted groups like Human Rights Watch which are concerned about such matters. I've written about it over these many months at Tomdispatch, for tiny audiences, without a researcher to help me, no less teams of reporters -- based upon nothing but a close reading of the press here and abroad and the kind of Google search ability that any journalist at a major paper could better in a few seconds. Despite the odd report on the methods that were quickly put in use in the privacy of military bases and offshore prisons, our cowed and demobilized press has generally preferred since 9/11 not to shine its spotlights -- or send its teams of reporters -- "into the shadows" to find out what indeed was going on; while its editorial pages preferred to blindly "support our troops in Iraq" and let the small problems like abuse and torture in those shadows go by the boards.

I mention this because, in the wake of the publication of the photos of the horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib, the editorial pages of our two imperial newspapers are suddenly in full cry. They are shocked, shocked, and ready to do something about it. And we have to be glad for that. On Wednesday, the Washington Post published an editorial acknowledging that what we were facing was, as the headline put it, A System of Abuse:

"Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday described the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison as ‘an exceptional, isolated' case. At best, that is only partly true. Similar mistreatment of prisoners held by U.S. military or intelligence forces abroad has been reported since the beginning of the war on terrorism. A pattern of arrogant disregard for the protections of the Geneva Conventions or any other legal procedure has been set from the top, by Mr. Rumsfeld and senior U.S. commanders. `Well-documented` accounts of human rights violations have been ignored or covered up, including some more serious than those reported at Abu Ghraib…"

The day after the same page called for Rumsfeld's resignation:

"Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable."

But it also called for the sort of special handling of terrorists that can only lead to further torture:

"In one important respect, Mr. Rumsfeld was correct: Not only could captured al Qaeda members be legitimately deprived of Geneva Convention guarantees (once the required hearing was held) but such treatment was in many cases necessary to obtain vital intelligence and prevent terrorists from communicating with confederates abroad. But if the United States was to resort to that exceptional practice, Mr. Rumsfeld should have established procedures to ensure that it did so without violating international conventions against torture and that only suspects who truly needed such extraordinary handling were treated that way."

It sounds so simple, but the "exceptional practice" – such a conveniently opaque phrase; it wouldn't work if they wrote what they meant in plain English, would it? -- quite naturally becomes the ordinary in such settings as Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. In the meantime, the New York Times, in recent months regularly a day late and a dollar short compared with the Post, called for Rumsfeld's departure on Friday and on the same day, offered its editorial version of our offshore penal system (The Military Archipelago):

"The road to Abu Ghraib began, in some ways, in 2002 at Guantánamo Bay. It was there that the Bush administration began building up a worldwide military detention system, deliberately located on bases outside American soil and sheltered from public visibility and judicial review. The administration shunned the scrutiny of independent rights monitors like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. It presumed that suspected agents of terrorism did not deserve normal legal protections, and it presumed that American officials could always tell a terrorist from an innocent bystander."

The editorial, while strong, promptly added: "So far as we know, the `psycho-sexual` humiliations that military jailers inflicted on Iraqi detainees last year at Abu Ghraib have no parallels in `American-run` prisons elsewhere."

Accounts by released Guantanamo prisoners and those in Afghanistan, in fact, indicate that `psycho-sexual` humiliations were part and parcel of the system itself. But the more important point is simply to imagine what might have happened if either of these imperial papers had made up their collective minds to shine a spotlight into the imperial darkness once they knew -- after all, the Bush administration practically broadcast this to the skies -- that we considered the Geneva Conventions beside the point in the "war on terror" and that our leading global principle would simply be the application of brute force of which we had, it was believed, the global preponderance? Now the editorial pages of these (and many other papers) are calling for official accountability and resignations as well as Donald Rumsfeld's head. Perhaps, however, there should be a little journalistic accountability as well, not to speak of the odd editorial apology and maybe even a resignation or two. (Fat chance, of course.) Despite the recent editorials and the burst of `front-page` coverage, let me just assure you that, given the performance of our `until-recently` cowed and demobilized press, there aren't going to be a lot of media profiles in courage to hand around when it comes to the last two years.

To give but a single example, during the period in the spring of 2003 when our media expressed outrage (as they should have) over the parading of American POWs before Iraqi propaganda cameras, they were showing the first shots of hooded Iraqi prisoners in what looked like burlap sacks. If you go back to our newspapers of that moment, you'll find such photos presented without comment and they were relatively commonplace on TV.

No one discussed "hooding" as a practice until the photos of the hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib suddenly made it look like a horror. And yet the practice, clearly systematic, had to have been carefully planned out and prepared for. Those bags didn't just materialize from the palm groves along the roadside. They must have been shipped in with the troops. I'm not an expert on war crimes, but I find it hard to believe that the hooding of prisoners is an agreed upon international practice in time of war.

As far as I can tell, for Iraqis themselves, though the specifics of Abu Ghraib undoubtedly shocked, none of this was, at heart, exactly news. After all, they were the ones who best grasped that the essential principle of the occupation was the use of brute force (in or out of prison); that the Coalition Provisional Authority and its head "administrator" L. Paul Bremer were instituting not a system of laws and rights backed by the vote -- democracy -- but a system of lawlessness focused on corporate spoils. Bremer's "democracy," run out of the isolation of the Green Zone in Baghdad, was `Iraqi-less`, but filled with corporate "contractors," including those who made, and evidently continue to make piles of money, by sending hired "interrogators" and "linguists" into our detention centers to join American "human exploitation teams" – a term I heard for the first time last night on ABC News -– and at least one of which, CACI International, is still advertising for interrogators willing to work under "moderate supervision" in the field in "AfghanistanIraqKosovo."

("Must be able to work and live in a hostile field environment with minimum medical facilities. Must process excellent communications skills and the ability to work in extreme environments for extended periods of time… Willing to travel and must posses the ability to be an effective communicator… Knowledge of Military police operations and Force Protection procedures. Experience conducting interrogations and interview using linguist and local interrupters. Knowledge of the reporting tools used in tactical interrogation operations.")

The need for "information" in Iraq was so great, reports Julian Borger of the Guardian, that there was a veritable rush to employment. He interviewed Torin Nelson, "one of a team of roughly 30 in Abu Ghraib employed by a `Virginia-based` firm, CACI International." Of Nelson's testimony he writes in part:

"Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an `over-reliance` on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent ‘cooks and truck drivers' to work as interrogators."

Enough Iraqis have passed through our prison system there -- 43,000 by some estimates, including perhaps 8,000 still in detention -- that this sort of thing was hardly news (as Jo Wilding recently pointed out in great detail at the Progressive Trail website). Protests by families of the detained have been going on there for months and months. Nor could it have been news that, among the "terrorists" slipping into the country, the CPA was sponsoring hired mercenaries who had formerly worked in death squads or at other heinous activities for the regimes of Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, and Milosevic's Serbia.

The Iraqis, of course, knew firsthand what a simple Google search could have brought you to here in the U.S. (as it did me), or what any American guard in one of our detention centers could certainly have told you. ("'It is a common thing to abuse prisoners,' military police sergeant Mike Sindar told Reuters of his time in Abu Ghraib. 'I saw beatings all the time.'")

Our Iraqi "prison" system has now been revealed to all as `16-17` detention centers countrywide, whose activities involve systematic beatings, abuse, torture, humiliation, and murder; the holding of tens of thousands of often innocent prisoners without charges, often beyond the reach of their families, sometimes off the books and from elsewhere ("ghost prisoners," as the intelligence people evidently call them), and in chaotic conditions (even Rumsfeld in his testimony could only offer an approximation of the number of prisoners held in the system). Until recently, however, it has been possible to learn more about the nature of this system from "Riverbend," a young woman blogger in Baghdad, largely confined to her house due to the insecurity of that city, than from our major papers, each with their teams of reporters, translators, aides, drivers, equipment handlers, and the like.

Having in the past described something of the nightmare of detention in her country under the occupation and meetings with the despairing relatives of the detained, she now writes in part:

"Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places… seeing the pictures simply made it all more real and tangible somehow. American and British politicians have the audacity to come on television with words like, 'True the people in Abu Ghraib are criminals, but…' Everyone here in Iraq knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained. Some were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, while others were detained 'under suspicion'. In the New Iraq, it's 'guilty until proven innocent by some miracle of God.'

"People are so angry. There's no way to explain the reactions- even `pro-occupation` Iraqis find themselves silenced by this latest horror. I can't explain how people feel- or even how I personally feel. Somehow, pictures of dead Iraqis are easier to bear than this grotesque show of American military technique. People would rather be dead than sexually abused and degraded by the animals running Abu Ghraib prison…

"I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can- while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We'll take our chances- just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go."

Part One of Two

The Torture System

Part Two of Two

Returning to, as scientists might say, the proximate cause of the present uproar -- the latest photos with, we now know, more and worse to come -- here's how a recent Washington Post piece started (New Prison Images Emerge):

"The collection of photographs begins like a travelogue from Iraq. Here are U.S. soldiers posing in front of a mosque. Here is a soldier riding a camel in the desert. And then: a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor.

"Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington Post are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them."

And so the young and impoverished here in our country were "enabled" -- to appropriate a word from the Taguba report -- to see the world via the U.S. military thanks to the Bush administration. Camels, the desert, a young woman in uniform holding a leashed Iraqi… one of so many images caught on digital cameras, packed onto compact discs, and sent home via computers to the folks; a modern twist on the 19th century colonial postcard or the thrilling stereopticon scene (which sometimes featured no less chilling visions of the conquered world).

"Having a good time…. Wish you were here!" And thanks to these images of and from the boys and girls next door ("It's not in her nature to do something like that. There's not a malicious bone in her body." "…she sometimes found it difficult to kill animals when they went hunting…"), Americans find themselves plunged into a different world. Okay, actually a number of those boys and girls were next door to American prisons where they were guards and no doubt none too kindly there either, but those who weren't were undoubtedly trying to escape a `burger-flipping` or `Wal-Mart`-clerking fate. And, as it turned out, the U.S. military under George Bush offered so many opportunities to be more than they could be or should have been.

From camels to leashed humans, their photos of the "exotic," instantly recognizable to 19th or 20th century historians, are the stuff of any brutal colonial occupation. The shots of Chinese severed heads from the good old days of the Boxer Rebellion, when an international expeditionary force took Peking, or those grim photo "albums" Japanese soldiers proudly brought back from their Pacific War "triumphs" in places like Nanking, or similar shots sent home from Vietnam (and published in the late 1960s in what was then called the "underground press"). The bloody and exotic always went so well together as long as you imagined the conquered – and even then, the missions of conquest had fancy, uplifting names like the French "mission civilatrice" -- as somehow less human than yourself. These were, of course, acts you would have hidden if they took place in your own world -- except under similar circumstances as, for instance, with the celebratory postcards of lynchings that were made well into this century in our own country.

"These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior," wrote Philip Kennicott in a powerful piece in the Washington Post, "the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo."

For us, the present imbroglio has been a long time coming; and unpredictable as the specifics with their modern twist (the digital photo loosed onto computer systems) may be, the path to these horrors was a remarkably straight one. We don't need further investigations to see this -- though I thought Rumsfeld's announcement Friday that he was setting up an "independent review board" to look into the previous investigations of Abu Ghraib had a certain charm. Assumedly it will be followed by an investigation of the investigation of the various earlier investigations, given that this "blue ribbon" panel, as the New York Times termed it in a piece Saturday, is made up so far only of members of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory body to the Pentagon, headed until recently by this administration's famed neocon "prince of darkness" Richard Perle. It might lead you to ask, "Independent of what exactly?"

Of course, why "investigate" when this has been investigated, and then General Taguba's scathing report was, against military regulations, classified secret and kept away from the public gaze until those "postcards" began to exfiltrate Iraq. (According to the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Secrecy, "The executive order that governs national security classification states that "In no case shall information be classified in order to... conceal violations of law.") You also don't need to investigate because simple logic takes you directly down the Guantanamo highway to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, which are sure to be simply a way station along the road to "atrocities" (the word Senator Kerry recently apologized for in relation to Vietnam) elsewhere, including in the prison cesspool that Guantanamo is sure to prove to be.

Most of the comments, apologetic or horrified, out of this administration really have to do with "image," "standing," loss of "reputation" or of "credibility," with "wrong impressions" and, of course, "damage control." Only to Americans, inside our imperial `bubble-world`, can these sound faintly reasonable or at all like actual apologies of any sort. The other day in his interview with Al Arabiya Television, for instance, the President said:

"In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse -- more than an allegation in this case, actual abuse, we saw the pictures -- there will be a full investigation and justice will be delivered. We have a presumption of innocent until you're guilty in our system, but the system will be transparent, it will be open and people will see the results. This is a serious matter. It's a matter that reflects badly on my country. Our citizens in America are appalled by what they saw, just like people in the Middle East are appalled. We share the same deep concerns. And we will find the truth, we will fully investigate. The world will see the investigation and justice will be served."

"The presumption of innocent[ce]" is indeed the American Way, as the President has said, but in this case only for America (and not, of course, for Jose Padilla or Yaser Esam Hamdi, American citizens who have experienced their own private Guantanamos in military brigs and jails right here in the USA). In fact, that was the very point of Bush administration policy `post-9`/11. Their `too-clever`-`by-half` move that produced the present situation was to portion off small `American-controlled` areas of the globe -- generally military bases, our modern imperial "gunboats" -- as "not America" and so beyond the legal reach or oversight of anyone from the Supreme Court to the International Red Cross. Guantanamo was, of course, to be the master stroke in this policy and so the pride of our new offshore penal system.

It tells you everything you need to know about that system that, two years later, this administration hasn't managed to conduct a single trial, even of the stacked sort they thought would put their enemies of choice away forever. (And remember, they made it quite clear that, should they lose any of these tribunals of their choosing, they considered it their right to keep prisoners behind bars anyway as long as the "war on terrorism" was ongoing.) This, too, is now the American Way. And -- let me say it once more -- what we're not talking about here is a system that has anything to do with determining "innocence," which would indeed imply a system of justice; it is intent only on the breaking of wills and the extraction of information, and so by its essential nature a torture system.

Note, by the way, that Major General Geoffrey Miller, head of Guantanamo prison, was recently brought to Iraq to "overhaul" the prison system there. (Our global `mini-gulag` is now extensive enough that it seems to have its own career ladder.) In the last few days, he has been one of a string of high officials who have "apologized" to Iraqis and now he claims that he's taking perhaps 10 of the `50-odd` techniques for severe interrogation, including hooding, off the table in that country. Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reports:

"But he defended practices like depriving prisoners of sleep and forcing them into ‘stress positions' as legitimate means of interrogation, noting that they are among `50-odd` coercive techniques sometimes used against enemy detainees. [He seems since to have changed his mind on sleep deprivation.]... He said he saw his main purpose in both places as extracting as much intelligence as possible to help the American war effort. ‘We were enormously proud of what we had done in Guantánamo, to be able to be able to set that kind of environment where we were focused on gaining the maximum amount of intelligence,' General Miller said…He also defended the use of contract interrogators, saying he had employed 30 at Guantánamo."

We now know as well that General Miller originally visited Abu Ghraib back in the fall of 2003 and seems to have really gotten the ball rolling by offering a little piece of helpful advice from a penal colony `all-star`. He suggested "that military detention centers in Iraq should serve as an ‘enabler for interrogation' and that the prison guards should ‘set the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.'"

As Seymour Hersh, whose New Yorker piece really broke the Abu Ghraib story, commented in an appearance on Fox TV's The O'Reilly Factor, "One of [the other investigations of Abu Ghraib] was done by a major general who was involved in Guantanamo, General Miller. And it's very classified, but I can tell you that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the military intelligence in control of the prison." The general, whether he has ever lifted a hand against a prisoner or directly ordered one of those "stress" methods (and it seems he has), is by the very nature of what he has overseen a torturer and, like those above him, deserves prosecution.

Out there in the world, given the system the Bush administration has spent over two years carefully setting in place, it's "guilty forever." Out there, whether at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, "Camp Justice" on the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia (an "aircraft carrier" of an island), or in so many detention areas, holding facilities, literal `aircraft-carrier` prisons, and even the foreign jails of "friendly allies," where prisoners have been more or less openly sent for torture, there is not only no presumption of innocence, but no chance of proving one's innocence.

Perhaps the most striking and least commented upon aspect of the recent interviews with Iraqi detainees, who were abused and tortured in various ways and are now on the outside (and so could be interviewed) is this: When asked why they were released, they invariably have no idea. One day, they were simply notified that they would soon be released, or they were just unceremoniously dumped out on the street. As far as I can tell, in no cases were their releases explained to them. This isn't strange. After all, what explanation could be offered, since the very concept of "innocence" has disappeared, as it must in a thoroughly extrajudicial world. (This sort of thing takes Kafka's famed novel The Trial, whose scenes were once a touchstone for describing totalitarian worlds, several steps beyond anything he imagined.)

Sooner or later, assumedly, detainees prove to be not innocent, but of no further use or perhaps they are found never to have been any use at all -- and so they're tossed out of prison with no more explanation than when they entered it. Robert Moran of Knight Ridder reported on one bizarre recent prisoner release from Abu Ghraib:

"Scores of prisoners released from the controversial Abu Ghraib prison Tuesday were forced to take a winding, nearly `five-hour` journey through central Iraq on three hot, rickety buses escorted by U.S. military Humvees before being deposited without explanation in the middle of a gravel quarry near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. It was unclear why the detainees, at least a hundred of them, were dropped off at the remote location 120 miles north of Baghdad… One detainee, who declined to give his name, asked, 'Is this democracy?'"

No, this had nothing to do with "democracy." It was the logical culmination of, the final small torture in an extrajudicial system meant only to extract information by whatever means. Now we know why Gillo Pontecorvo's film about rebellion and torture in French colonial Algeria, The Battle of Algiers, was shown at the Pentagon back in 2003. It's just too bad that everyone evidently focused on the tortures, meant to break the back of the Algerian resistance, and ignored the film's ending.

And here's the irony of it all. Such methods -- from the "softening up" humiliations to the harder stuff -- were meant to crack first the hard nuts of `al-Qaeda` and then the `bitter-ender` Baathists from Saddam's regime of torture and murder. But the more information these prisons and their "exploitation" units pumped out, the more insecure Iraq (and the world became). The more they applied such horrors to crack our enemies, the closer this administration came to cracking itself. ("One Pentagon consultant said that officials with whom he works on Iraq policy continue to put on a happy face publicly, but privately are grim about the situation in Baghdad. When it comes to discussions of the administration's Iraq policy, he said, ‘It's "Dead Man Walking."'") Now the `post-9`/11 torture system, in the form of those postcards from the edge, seems to be cracking the Bush administration wide open. Under "torture," it's they who have folded. If there isn't a lesson here, remind me what the lesson should be.

Who are we anyway?
Novelist and former British intelligence officer John Le Carré wrote a series of Cold War thrillers, of which the most famous were The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. All of them cumulatively offered an essential insight for that era. Although the Russian KGB, British intelligence, and our own CIA had all plunged "into the shadows" to play the deadly game of spy vs. spy, it turned out, in that underground realm, where each side believed itself to be blocking the other's crucial advances, something strange was happening. Their spies and our spies were coming to feel they had more in common with each other than with either of the societies they were ostensibly defending. Underground, their ways of life began to merge. Le Carré's was an essential insight and he was the first to bring it back from the intelligence netherworld in novels that are still striking to read.

But here's the strange thing -- as he makes clear in his latest thriller Absolute Friends -- when the Soviet Union collapsed, instead of folding its tent, the last standing global superpower simply absorbed much from the other side and soon plunged further into the shadows. And in doing so, our own system -- out there in the imperium (and increasingly at home as well) -- became more "absolute," more oppressive, more -- in short -- Russian.

We see the grim results of that in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We see it in the continuous growth of the Pentagon despite the loss of all major military enemies. We see it in the grim, `helter-skelter` way the Bush administration has been replaying its own primal experiences -- the Cold War and Vietnam. In particular, though it's hardly been noted, we see it in the way this administration is acting out the one policy that, in the era of two superpowers, remained a fantasy.

Given the power of the Russian military, especially once it nuclearized, the American position in the Cold War was generally considered one of "containment." But particularly in the early years, another policy was discussed with fervor. John Foster Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Secretary or State (and brother of `then-CIA` Director Allen Dulles) called it "rollback." We were to rollback the borders of the Soviet empire by subversion and by military power. Never practiced (except in a few heady `Korean-War` months), it was much dreamt about.

Now, in the `post-Soviet` era, our government has taken aspects of the worst Cold War dreams of both sides. It wants to dominate the world. (Remember when this is what we swore they wanted to do?) It wants to control an extrajudicial penal system for its enemies, a kind of global Siberia shielded from prying eyes of any sort; and it wants rollback of the now pathetically impoverished remnants of the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia (still dangerously nuclear armed). So as NATO has, with our enthusiastic support pushed deep into the western borderlands of the old Soviet Union, the U.S. military has driven its own bases deep into the former Yugoslavia, the former Islamic SSRs, those ‘stans of Central Asia, into Afghanistan (where the Soviet Union essentially expired in a brutal lost war that also gave birth to al Qaeda), and prospectively into the former SSR of Georgia which sits on a crucial oil pipeline meant to bring Caspian oil to Europe and beyond.

This then is the world according to Bush, the world from which those photos emerged.

Source:
Progressive News
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/04051...ngelhardt.shtml

Brass defends ongoing intelligence from Gitmo

By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Military officials at Guantanamo Bay aggressively defend the "tremendous" intelligence value of detainees held at the naval base despite a legal battle over the detainees' rights and critics who say information from men imprisoned nearly three years is, at best, dated.

"Detainees under our charge right now have provided us tremendous insight and intelligence regarding how terrorist organizations recruit, fund, train and plan, and how they have the ability to compartmentalize information, operations and projects," said Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the Guantanamo prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Held at the prison are about 550 detainees, the vast majority captured in Afghanistan in the months after the September 11 attacks during the U.S.-led campaign to topple the al `Qaeda-backing` Taliban regime.

Gen. Hood, who spoke last week with reporters at Guantanamo, said intelligence gleaned during interrogation sessions "has been of extraordinary value to the United States as we take on terrorist organizations as enemies of our country."

But some intelligence authorities question the motivation behind continuing to interrogate men imprisoned in `near-solitary` confinement for nearly three years.

"The longer you keep these people, the less valuable they become," said Melvin A. Goodwin, a former CIA senior analyst. "They get socialized, they figure out what kind of answers interrogators want and they provide them.

"If you don't get [good intelligence] in an initial `go-round`, chances are you're never going to get it," said Mr. Goodwin, who heads the National Security Program at the Center for International Policy, an advocacy group for international cooperation, demilitarization and human rights.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official who was involved with interrogations in the Near East, said that "the thing to remember is that information is amazingly perishable."

"When they are talking about holding people three years after the fact and still getting information from them, I just don't believe that," said Mr. Giraldi, who previously was an Army intelligence case officer. "The men at Gitmo probably know little or nothing about the current practices in al Qaeda."

Gen. Hood acknowledged that intelligence pulled from detainees "is far more on the strategic side than the `specific-action` side," meaning it cannot be used to guide immediate arrests or military action.

But he defended its relevance, suggesting that some nonmilitary agencies depend on it. Each week, he said, agencies from across the U.S. government send "hundreds of individual requests for information associated with the detainees under our control."

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Robert L. Maginnis said it makes sense other agencies would be hungry for information drawn from such a religious, cultural, ethnic and historic reservoir.

"We really do not, even three years after 9/11, have a thorough understanding of some of the complexities of the enemy that's out there, especially as they involve cultural, tribal, ethnic and religious issues," Col. Maginnis said.

From a strategic standpoint, he said, the detainees could be valuable in piecing together information about the relationship between terrorist organizations and certain Middle East governments.

However, Mr. Giraldi dismissed the notion that such intelligence is coming from the detainees.

"Strategic intelligence is information that enables you to connect the dots in a `broad-brush` way," he said. "The problem is that even strategic information becomes less and less useful with the passage of time."

He added that a more realistic motivation behind continuing to interrogate detainees is their usefulness in "training and testing interrogators" on live subjects.

Mr. Goodwin agreed it is highly unlikely the detainees are providing "anything of strategic value." Strategic intelligence, he said, would consist of "`longer-term` motivations of the organizations they come from, what is the agenda of these groups, what motivates them."

He said men held at Guantanamo would not have such information about al Qaeda because they were captured as `low-level` foot soldiers during battle in Afghanistan.

"This was just a grab bag. They were just scooping people up off the battlefield," he said, adding that truly valuable al Qaeda suspects such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the mastermind of September 11 — are not held at Guantanamo. The government will not say where Mohammed is being interrogated.

Other top terrorists — such as Hambali, who headed the al `Qaeda-linked` Jemaah Islamiyah group in Asia and is believed responsible for the 2002 bombings that killed hundreds in a Bali nightclub in Indonesia — reportedly are held at the U.S. military base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Mr. Goodwin complained of the "borderline torture" of some Guantanamo detainees. The Pentagon has acknowledged some abuses, including an incident in which a female interrogator removed her uniform top, stripped down to her `T-shirt` and "ran her fingers through the detainee's hair and sat on his lap." In other cases, detainees were made to kneel for extended periods.

Human rights groups condemn such tactics. Compounding the situation is a legal battle over the rights of detainees to challenge their detention.

Calling the detainees "enemy combatants" undeserving of protection under the Geneva Conventions, the administration intends to try many in special `war-crimes` tribunals.

But that plan was dealt a blow Monday when a federal judge in the District ruled that President Bush overstepped his authority in classifying detainees eligible for the tribunals, intended to be the first of their kind since World War II. The administration vowed to appeal.

Source:
http://washingtontimes.com/national/200411...`25413-4233r`.htm

CIA accused of torture at Bagram base

Some captives handed to brutal foreign agencies

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
The Guardian

The CIA has used "stress and duress" techniques on `al-Qaida` suspects held at secret overseas detention centres, as well as contracting out their interrogation to foreign intelligence agencies known to routinely use torture, said a report published yesterday.

The Washington Post paints a harrowing picture of the procedures for extracting information from terrorism suspects at such centres as Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean island leased from Britain, and Bagram, the large US airbase in Afghanistan.

Inmates at Bagram are kept in painful positions for hours, hooded or made to wear opaque goggles, or bombarded with light, the report says. However, other detainees have faced far worse for not cooperating, being "rendered" to a foreign intelligence service which has no compunction about torture.

The Post suggests there has been a sweeping change in US policy on torture since September 11, despite public pronouncements against its use. It quotes Cofer Black, the former director of the CIA's `counter-terrorist` branch, as telling a congressional intelligence committee: "All you need to know: there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11... After 9/11 the gloves come off."

Yesterday's report has deepened concern in human rights circles about the fate of the roughly 3,000 people quietly detained around the world.

"I think there needs to be a clear statement from the US government that they are abiding by the Geneva convention with the treatment of detainees," James Ross, a senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, said yesterday.

"Turning people over to another government to do something that would amount to torture is a problem. It is torture by proxy, and the US should not be doing that."

The CIA refused to comment on the report yesterday.

Reports that there could be abuse of detainees at Diego Garcia could also prove embarrassing for Britain. The Indian Ocean atoll is a British dependency and houses joint US and British air and naval facilities.

"If they know about this, and torture and mistreatment are taking place in Diego Garcia, British officials could also be viewed as taking part in torture," Mr Ross said.

The report offers the first details of inmates' treatment at CIA camps outside Guantanamo Bay, where some 600 `al-Qaida` suspects are held. But the Guantanamo inmates have had at least limited access to lawyers, journalists, and the Red Cross, whereas Bagram is strictly `off-limits`, and human rights groups fear conditions could be worse.

Earlier this month, officials said they would launch a criminal inquiry into the death of two prisoners at Bagram. One reportedly died of a heart attack, the other of a pulmonary embolism.

US laws apparently do not apply at the centres, where CIA agents oversee - or take part in - the interrogations. While the US publicly denounces torture, the Post says each of the 10 serving national security officials interviewed by the paper defended the use of violence against captives.

"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," an official who has supervised the capture of suspects told the newspaper. "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA."

The report says CIA agents sometimes trick a detainee into thinking he is held in a state where torture is routine. On other occasions, `low-level` suspects have been handed over to Jordanian, Egyptian, and Moroccan agencies - known for their brutality - with a list of questions from the CIA.

Some US officials claim the main motive of such "renditions" is the belief that a suspect will open up if questioned in his own language or on familiar terrain.

However, one official directly involved in rendering captives to foreign hands is quoted as saying: "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them."

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/stor...,865454,00.html

Human Rights Watch: British Territory Must Not Be Used for Torture

(London, December 31, 2002) — The British government must ensure that the United States does not torture suspected `al-Qaeda` detainees held on the island of Diego Garcia, part of British Indian Ocean Territory, Human Rights Watch said today.

In a letter to U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Human Rights Watch referred to U.S. press reports that the U.S. was detaining and interrogating `al-Qaeda` suspects at a U.S. facility on Diego Garcia and that U.S. interrogations reportedly include practices that violate customary and conventional international law prohibitions against torture and mistreatment.

“British officials should not look the other way if the U.S. is abusing `al-Qaeda` suspects on British territory,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Leasing land on Diego Garcia to the U.S. does not allow the U.K. to ignore its obligation to prevent torture.”

In the letter to Blair, Human Rights Watch cited international treaty obligations that require all governments to take effective measures to prevent, investigate, and punish torture occurring on territory subject to their jurisdiction.

Last week, Human Rights Watch urged U.S. President George W. Bush immediately to affirm that the use of torture is contrary to U.S policy, to investigate the reported allegations of torture and mistreatment of `al-Qaeda` detainees held by the United States, to adopt all necessary measures to end any such torture or mistreatment, and to prosecute those responsible for such abuse. Human Rights Watch's statement to President Bush can be found at http://hrw.org/press/2002/12/us1227.htm

Source:
http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/12/uk1230.htm

Diego Garcia: A Brief History

Far, far from both the Indian subcontinent and Africa lies the equatorial Chagos Island chain, the largest island of which is Diego Garcia. Few British or American people have ever heard of it, but today I want to tell you its story.

First, a little history:

It was only during the `mid-1780s` that the permanent settlement of the Chagos Archipelago began under French rule. In February 1783, Sieur Pierre Marie Le Normand, an influential sugar and coconut plantation owner from the Black River district, petitioned Governor Vicomte de Souillac for a major land concession on Diego Garcia in order to establish a large coconut plantation. During the same month, the French governor gave this important Mauritian landowner “a favourable reply”. In 1784, more than a year after the land concession was granted, Le Normand set out with two ships from Mauritius to Diego Garcia with 79 Mozambican and Malagasy slaves as well as a few free ‘coloureds’ who were skilled workers. The ships also contained materials for the construction of a large coconut plantation.[/quote]

The islands remained continuously inhabited by the descendants of these workers until 1965, with the principal export being copra, dried coconut which yields a very valuable oil.

In 1814, with French colonial power waning in the area, the Chagos were ceded to Britain to form the colony of Mauritius. Britain’s Mauritius Territory formed the modern day nations of Mauritius, Seychelles as well as the Chagos Archipelago.

In 1965, two very key events occurred. The first was that Britain ceded independence to Mauritania (and later Seychelles) but with the stipulation that the Chagos Archipelago remain under British control. This was in direct violation of General Assembly resolution 2066, passed in 1965, which stated in part:

Recalling its resolution 1514 (XV) of 14 December 1960 containing the Declaration on Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,

Regretting that the administering Power has not fully implemented resolution 1514 (XV) with regard to that Territory,

Noting with deep concern that any step taken by the administering Power to detach certain islands from the Territory of Mauritius for the purpose of establishing a military base would be in contravention of the Declaration, and in particular of paragraph 6 thereof...[/quote]

Friends, that’s exactly what Britain did. It severed the Chagos from the rest of the Mauritius Territory and transformed it into a military base in direct contravention of UN General Assembly Resolution 1514.

The British then created the British Indian Ocean Territory, a colony which still exists today. All of the islands not in the Chagos Archipelago were transferred to the Seychelles when they obtained independence in 1976.

Here is what the CIA Factbook has to say about the matter of the creation of the military base and what happened to the inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago:

The largest and most southerly of the islands, Diego Garcia, contains a joint `UK-US` naval support facility. All of the remaining islands are uninhabited. Former agricultural workers, earlier residents in the islands, were relocated primarily to Mauritius but also to the Seychelles, between 1967 and 1973. In 2000, a British High Court ruling invalidated the local immigration order that had excluded them from the archipelago, but upheld the special military status of Diego Garcia.[/quote]

What actually happened was quite sickening. The Americans wanted to build a major base on Diego Garcia and, to ensure secrecy, pressured the British to remove all of the local inhabitants. The British agreed (and got a major discount on the purchase of a nuclear submarine from the Americans), and using a variety of fictions, removed every single native inhabitants to Mauritius (over 1,000 miles away) or the Seychelles, quite against their will.

AntiWar.com:

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, 1,000 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 undersecretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: “We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls.” [/quote]

It must be remembered here that the native peoples, called the “Ilios”, were British citizens and carried British passports at the time of their forced exile. Most of the Iliosians were loaded onto cargo (not passenger) ships, sailed to Port Louis in Mauritius and dumped on the docks without ceremony or welcome.

Many of them committed suicide, turned to alcohol or drugs or sank to a life of prostitution and crime (you can read their sad story here). Yet some of them fought on, and after decades of struggle, won an important victory in British High Court in 2000.

The British High Court ruled that the expulsion of the Ilios had been illegal and ordered that they be allowed to return to their homes. However, the British Foreign Office (State Department) soon declared that a return to Diego Garcia would not be possible. The reason? The “treaty” with the United States over the leased military base forbade it. The treaty however had never been seen or ratified by the British Parliament or the American Congress.

The British government then conducted a “study” on the other islands in the Chagos Archipelago and “determined” they were unfit for human habitation. This despite the fact that thousands of American and British servicemen and women live quite comfortably in the area.

In fact, let me quote to you the from the U.S. Navy‘s own website about Diego Garcia:

Personal living conditions on the island are excellent. Personnel are normally assigned permanent rooms upon arrival. `E-5` and below are assigned two to a room and `E-6` and above have private quarters.

All BEQs have a common lounge with a color TV, pool table, and microwave oven. The BEQs are also equipped with an adequate amount of washers and dryers.[/quote]

In 2003, again in British courts, the government invoked “royal prerogative” to forbid the islanders from returning. They are now taking their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Aside from yet another colonial tragedy of ethnic cleansing, and the fact that British citizens were forcibly expelled from their homes, why should anyone care about Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago? Well, it turns out it may be home to something besides American and British military bases.

While given little attention in the popular media, Diego Garcia may now house “interrogation centers” for captured people in the “War on Terror”, similar to that on Guantanamo Bay. In May 2004, the BBC reported that `high-ranking` suspects were possibly being held (and interrogated) on Diego Garcia.

Whereas the International Committee for the Red Cross have been able to visit Guantanamo Bay and the facility at Bagram (Afghanistan), it has not been able to visit Diego Garcia. No one has, other than members of the military. And considering that the nearest land to the Chagos Archipelago is more than 1,000 miles away, no one can even get close.

According to Time Magazine:

The U.S. guards this strategic jewel closely. Aside from a brief tour allowed in 1976 while Carter made noises about “demilitarizing” the region, nary a journalist has set foot on the island—a Newsweek writer’s dateline from that trip was wryly datelined “Somewhere East of Suez.” Construction and maintenance of the base’s communications equipment, fuel facilities and military hardware is done strictly by military contractors, and inventories of that weaponry is classified. With no civilians allowed, Diego Garcia remains the loneliest military outpost in the world.[/quote]

The Washington Post wrote a story mentioning interrogation at Diego Garcia in 2002:

In contrast to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where military lawyers, news reporters and the Red Cross received occasional access to monitor prisoner conditions and treatment, the CIA’s overseas interrogation facilities are `off-limits` to outsiders, and often even to other government agencies. In addition to Bagram and Diego Garcia, the CIA has other secret detention centers overseas, and often uses the facilities of foreign intelligence services.[/quote[

Suspicion for the use of Diego Garcia as a secret interrogation center was aroused when the ICRC, while visiting the publically known facilities, did not encounter certain `high-ranking` (alleged) `Al-Qaeda` members such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Inquiries into his location have gone unanswered and no one outside the government will say where he is although the British paper Sun reported he was transferred to Diego Garcia. As in Guantanamo Bay and Bagram, both the number of prisoners as well as their names is also a government secret.

Indeed Time Magazine reported in 2002 [b]that Abu Zubaydah, an (alleged) `Al-Qaeda` aide to Osama bin Laden, was transferred to Diego Garcia for interrogation.

On December 28, 2002, the international organization Human Rights Watch published an [url=http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/12/uk1230ltr.htm]
open letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. An excerpt: [/url]

The treatment of detainees on Diego Garcia also implicates the legal obligations of the British government. As a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), your government should not turn a blind eye to the practices of U.S. personnel on Diego Garcia. The U.K. government’s duty to prevent, investigate and prosecute any case of torture applies to all land subject to British jurisdiction.

We urge your government to reaffirm your commitment to these human rights obligations immediately, unequivocally and publicly. We also ask you to communicate to the U.S. government your insistence that anyone held by the United States on Diego Garcia be treated at all times in a manner consistent with international prohibitions of torture. You should put the U.S. government on notice of your determination to comply with your international legal obligation to secure the prosecution of anyone, including U.S. personnel, who engages in torture. We also urge you to request a commitment in writing from the U.S. government as a condition of continued use of the island that it will comply with international law governing the treatment of detainees.[/quote]

Even the relatively lightweight USA Today newspaper reported that `high-ranking` U.S. intelligence officers were reporting that interrogations of (alleged) `Al-Qaeda` members were taking place on Diego Garcia.

The interrogations are allegedly taking place either on ships anchored offshore (to avoid legal complications) or else in Camp Justice, the American military facility on the island.

Although no one can visit the island, you can see a satellite picture of “Camp Justice” here.

The U.S. and British governments in fact have been disengenous in answering questions about the matter:

A US Navy public affairs spokesman said no detainees are or have been held at the naval support facility in Diego Garcia but could not talk about other parts of the base there.

A British Foreign Office spokesman said: “The US authorities have repeatedly assured us that reports that any suspected terrorists or Iraqi prisoners are being or have been held or interrogated on the island, or on any vessel anchored there, are unfounded."

That’s not quite the same thing as denying it though, is it? In 2003, Lord Wallace of Saltaire brought up the subject in the British House of Lords:

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, can the Minister assure us that the Government are fully briefed on the conditions under which the United States is keeping prisoners from the Taliban on Diego Garcia in view of the serious allegations made in the Washington Post and the Herald Tribune on 27th December? The United States is, at the very least, steering close to the wind as regards the Geneva Convention and other aspects of international law. This is sovereign British territory and therefore, as I understand it and as the Minister has confirmed, the British Government are responsible for ensuring that international law is fully observed.

Baroness Amos: My Lords, I am aware of the stories in the press. Those stories are entirely without foundation. The United States Government would need to ask for our permission to bring any suspects to Diego Garcia. It has not done so and no suspected terrorists are being held on Diego Garcia.

I wish I could trust my own government. But after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, I don’t feel I can anymore. Are people being held and interrogated, perhaps even tortured, on Diego Garcia?[/quote]

If you’d like to read more about the Ilois (displaced Chagos Islanders) and support their cause, please visit their website.
http://www.iloistrust.org/