This tidbit about an Amnesty International report yesterday on extraordinary rendition caught my eye:
Others have suggested “high-value” detainees could be held secretly in Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean that the United States rents as a strategic military base. [Link]
Torture is hardly a newcomer to the Indian Ocean. You only have to go a bit north of the atoll to see it in practice by both intelligence and garden-variety cops on the subcontinent. But has the CIA joined the party? The Toronto Star reported last month:
… intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia’s geographic isolation is now being exploited for other, darker purposes… These prisoners are known as “ghost detainees” or the “new disappeared,” and they’re being subjected to treatment that makes the abuses at the military-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba look small-time, say intelligence analysts…
Analysts say there are at least a score of unacknowledged facilities around the world… one, they suspect, on Diego Garcia, where two navy prison ships ferry prisoners in and out… the United Nations said it will investigate a number of allegations from reliable sources that the U.S. is detaining terrorist suspects in undeclared holding facilities, including on board ships believed to be in the Indian Ocean. “Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility,” says American defence analyst John Pike. “They want somewhere that’s difficult to escape from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal.”
The British government has flatly denied detainees are being held covertly on the island. When asked last year, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Lawrence DiRita didn’t deny it outright, saying only, “I don’t know. I simply don’t know.” [Link]
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. [Link]
Diego Garcia is a 6œ-by-13-mile coral atoll in the Indian Ocean south of Sri Lanka. It’s as long as Manhattan and three times as wide, but with much less usable land. With a huge central lagoon protected on three sides by land, it’s an equatorial paradise. The lagoon reaches depths of 60-100 feet with coral underneath.
In the early ’70s, the British government forcibly deported the 2,000 Iloi residents, mostly coconut farmers, to Mauritius to make way for a military base which it leased to the U.S.:
In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary 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…” Under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction”, another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as “a floating population” and to “make up the rules as we go along”… In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness…Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the “sanitising”, ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles… The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase…
In 2000, the islanders won a historic victory in the high court, which ruled their expulsion illegal… In 2003, in a now notorious follow-up high court case, the islanders were denied compensation… Last June, the government invoked the archaic royal prerogative in order to crush the 2000 judgment. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned forever from returning home. [Link]
[A British judge] also blocked their compensation claim… During one of the case hearings, a lawyer acting for the islanders, Robin Allen, said the move had left most of them destitute. Many were illiterate and skilled only in coconut-picking. ‘Their claim is about forced displacement,’ Allen said. ‘They did not go willingly. They were removed from these islands by the British government…’ [Link]
But never mind the islanders, the Footprint of Freedom’s official Web site will have you know that they’re protecting the chickens 
We also share the island with a large number of feral chickens. There is also a substantial number of feral donkeys in the restricted part of the island. Our British hosts and those Americans who have come before you have made every effort to maintain the ecological integrity of Diego Garcia. As a result — other than swimming fish — all life forms, including live shell fish, are protected by British law. [Link]
The useful and heavily-trafficked base supported bombers in both U.S.-Iraq wars and the U.S.-Afghanistan war. It has hosted B-52s and B-2 stealths, amphibious assault ships, submarines and cruise missiles just off the tip of India:
Diego Garcia was a major American air base in the 1991 and 2003 Persian Gulf wars. The island is a British colony, but has been used by US forces since the 1970s. The island is shaped like a footprint and contains 6720 acres of land, none of which is more than 22 feet above sea level. There is also a large anchorage. The US Navy began building facilities on the island in the 1970s. By the 1980s, over half a billion dollars had been spent on an airbase, anchorage and logistics facilities. There are less than a hundred British military personnel on the island, plus nearly 2,000 American troops and over a thousand civilian contractors. [Link]
The B-2 uses a stealth (anti-radar) system that depends a lot on a smooth outer skin. That, in turn, requires that the usual access panels and such on the B-2 must be covered with tape and special paste to make it all smooth. And after every flight, a lot of this tape and paste has to be touched up… A team of four robots can now apply a liquid coating to B-2s, thus cutting maintenance hours in half. But B-2s still requires a special, climate controlled hangars… B-2 quality hangers have been built at Guam, in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian ocean… [Link]
Here’s satellite imagery of the military base. Why the base was built:
The Defense Department stated that the United States had three major concerns in the area: (1) maintaining dialogue with Arab states; (2) protecting the sea-lanes, especially oil routes; and (3) countering the Soviet presence. All three were considered justifications for strong United States forces in the ocean, especially the latter two… The central location of the island would provide better defense of the sea-lanes than any of the more remote support bases, by enhancing the effectiveness of American naval deployment in the area…… in 1966 the United States and Great Britain decided that their mutual security interests would be best served if they maintained an installation in the Indian Ocean… As an incentive to British participation, the United States agreed to lower the cost of a group of Polaris submarines that it was selling to Britain by $14 million. The agreement, however, was kept as quiet as possible, so as to secure purchase of the islands from Mauritius, which at this time was gaining its independence and feared a foreign military establishment in the area… [Link]
What makes the situation awkward is that Mauritius wants the island back when the lease runs out in 2016. But this isn’t another Falklands War yet, so don’t cry for me, Argentina:
The President, Mr. K. R. Narayanan, today affirmed that… India was firmly with the Government of Mauritius on the issue of restoration of its sovereign right over “its own soil” in the Chagos Archipelago… The Diego Garcia American base in the Indian Ocean is on one of the islands of the Chagos Archipelago and the Mauritius Government is keen that the British hand it over when the current lease expires. The situation is somewhat similar to that of Hong Kong before the British gave it back to China at the end of its lease in 1999, but complicated by the fact that Britain had allowed the United States to build its base here, strategically located in the Indian Ocean. [Link]
Here’s an interesting history of the island’s discovery:
The island currently known as Diego Garcia was probably discovered in 1512 by a famous Portuguese captain named Pedro Mascarenhas. Early in that year he was sailing in an ‘armada’ (fleet) under the aegis of one Dom Garcia de Noronhas, who would later go on to be the Third Viceroy of India (1538-1542). At the time, Portuguese ships on their way to India would round the Cape Horn and stick close to the coast of Africa on their way north. They would then head East across the Arabian Sea, sailing in between the Laccadive and Maldive islands to the Malabar coast of India.
… some uppity native (this time Adil Shah) was trying to kick the Portuguese out of Goa, and Albuquerqe (a famous Portuguese administrator) needed help. So , Pedro Mascarenhas had his ship detached to hurry to India, finding out if there was a faster route than simply following the African coastline northwards. Pedro sailed East into uncharted waters, and then North towards India. On the way he “discovered” (at least for the Europeans) a number of islands. The ‘Mascarene’ Islands, of course, are named after him, and he also apparently named the Chagos archipelago and Peros Banhos. But what about that lovely little island that would later become known as the “Footprint of Freedom”? Apparently, it was called “Dom Garcia”, after Pedro’s boss…
… It was apparently common on Portuguese charts to use abbreviations, so “I. de D. Garcia” may have been assumed to be ‘Diego’ instead of ‘Dom’. While speculative, this mistake may have been further fueled by the fact that there was a famous Portuguese navigator/cartographer/instructor named Diego Garcia de Palacios at about the same timeframe. An English mapmaker, copying from a language he might not have known, might easily have assumed that the ‘D.’ stood for the “Diego” he knew, rather than the “Dom” he may never have heard of… In short, the island appears to have been originally named “Dom Garcia” and was marked as such on maps until about 1600, when an English mapmaker called it “Diego Garcia” for reasons we can only estimate. [Link]
