Britain's Own Guantanamo

Ministers Must End The Cover-Ups Over Diego Garcia's Role As A Centre Of CIA Rendition and Torture

By David Vine
Tuesday 28 July 2009 19.30 BST
Courtesy Of The Guardian

Piece by piece, the truth is finally coming out about Britain's own Guantánamo Bay – Diego Garcia. Today the human rights lawyers group Reprieve began a legal case on behalf of Saad Iqbal Madni, who they say was transited through the UK-controlled Indian Ocean island as part of the CIA's secret rendition programme.

Madni, whom Reprieve says was tortured in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay after his stopover in Diego Garcia, has been released in Pakistan where – according to Clive Stafford Smith, the Reprieve director – he is "effectively crippled by his torture".

For more than six years following the declaration of a war on terror in 2001, British and US officials adamantly rejected the existence of a rendition facility or secret CIA prison on the island, the site of a major British-American military base since the 1970s and long off-limits to civilians, reporters, and investigators. Dismissing reports about detainees on the atoll as "totally without foundation", Britain's then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, asserted: "United States authorities have repeatedly assured us that no detainees have at any time passed in transit through Diego Garcia or its territorial waters or have disembarked there."

However, allegations kept accumulating. In 2003, Time magazine cited an intelligence official as saying that a senior al-Qaida operative – Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali – was being interrogated on the base. Later that year, the UK's Bar Human Rights Committee wrote to Straw concerned that the island or ships in or around its waters were being used to hold terrorist suspects. In 2004 and 2006, Barry McCaffrey, a retired US army general, named Diego Garcia as a detention facility in interviews. In his book Ghost Plane, the journalist Stephen Grey documented the presence on the island of a CIA-chartered plane used for rendition flights. And the Council of Europe named the atoll as a secret prison.

Finally, in February 2008, the official line cracked: "Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia has not been used for rendition flights," David Miliband announced to parliament, "recent US investigations have now revealed two occasions, both in 2002, when this had in fact occurred." The US expressed regret over what it called an "administrative error". CIA officials indicated they were "as confident as they can be" that no other detainees had been held on the island and continued to deny the existence of a CIA prison.

Months later, however, Reprieve and the Spanish newspaper El País offered new evidence that the US may have held large numbers of detainees on secret prison ships in Diego Garcia's lagoon or its surrounding waters. Subsequent Time and Guardian articles, citing interviews with intelligence officials, indicated that as many as 10 detainees had been held on or around the island from 2002 until as late as 2006.

Other recent revelations are showing the broader extent of UK complicity in US interrogation and torture policies. The Liberal Democrats and Reprieve have found evidence that the British government systematically destroyed flight logs for Diego Garcia, possibly covering up more proof of UK involvement in secret detention. It is increasingly difficult to believe officials' claims that they've been unaware of US activities on the island.

This is not how democracies are supposed to operate. The tawdry back and forth of denials and revelations, of lies and cover-ups, is a stain on the governments of both nations. Sadly it's an all too familiar tale on an island base created when, from 1968 to 1973, UK and US officials conspired to expel the entire local population of Chagossians, to hide the expulsion from the world, and to callously stymie the people's struggle to return home.

With so much still unknown about the shadowy past and present on Diego Garcia, the Brown and Obama administrations must open the island, the prison ships, the documentary record and other suspected black sites worldwide to full parliamentary and congressional investigations, as well as to independent international investigators, journalists, and the Red Cross.

If both nations are to repair the damage that secret rendition and torture have done to our democracies, to our security and to our moral standing in the world, the two governments must fully air the sad record of British-American collaboration on Diego Garcia and finally reject the use of secret detention facilities and torture everywhere on earth.