Diego Garcia remains nominally British territory, but it has been leased to the US until at least 2016.
It's hard to overstate how important Diego Garcia is as a US base.
It's a naval refuelling and support station. It has a James Bond-esque submarine support facility. It has an air base that has supported B-52 and Stealth bomber attacks in Afghanistan, in the two wars on Iraq, and in any future war on Iran. It's a regular deployment site for US Navy P-3C Orion maritime patrol and anti-submarine aircraft. Diego Garcia is part of the US "Space Surveillance Network". It's a Space Shuttle emergency landing site. It's not even subject to a nuclear weapons free zone for Africa, even though the rest of its archipelago is included.
Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said he was "absolutely and categorically certain" that prisoners have been held on the island. "If the foreign affairs committee approaches this thoroughly, they will get to the bottom of it," he said.
Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general who is professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, has twice spoken publicly about the use of Diego Garcia to detain suspects.
In May 2004 he said: "We're probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq." In December 2006, he repeated the claim: "They're behind bars...we've got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo."
In 1984, a review by the US government's general accounting office of construction work on the island reported that a "detention facility" had been completed the previous December. British ministers have also disclosed that a building on the island was redesignated as a prison after the September 11 attacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment