Tag: Diego Garcia

Aug 11 2008

Ghost Islands: Diego Garcia

WANTED: Extraterritorial location for indefinite detentions, torture of prisoners, and gigantic secret military installation.  Island preferred, remoteness a plus; must be cleared of troublesome natives and provide for completely restricted access.  Ideal landlord would consist of a compliant allied government willing to eat up the obvious bullshit that we’re going to spew trying to explain the patently illegal actions we carry out on their territory.

Contact:  D. Vader, US Naval Observatory.  Seriously corrupt inquiries only.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where our old ally Great Britain will answer the above ad – by cravenly permitting the United States to reverse-colonize Her Majesty’s empire on the island of Diego Garcia.  Upon (and in the waters near to) this speck of coral in the Indian Ocean, the British and Americans have established a base/prison/human rights deprivation facility that has played a larger role in the Global War of Terror than even Guantanamo Bay – a fact to which the Brits, at least, are finally growing wise.

Feb 28 2008

A tortuous cover-up

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The British government admits to complicity in two cases of “extraordinary rendition”, but claims they are an isolated case and promises that it “never uses torture for any purpose, including obtaining information, neither would we instigate actions by others to do so.”

Feb 22 2008

Torture: Where In The World Is Diego Garcia?

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

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A Map

Today UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband apologized to parliament.  He admitted that US “special rendition” illegal extradition flights had landed on British soil despite earlier assurances that they hadn’t.

Join me in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  

Oct 22 2007

Twilight of the Bushites

Aus des Rheines Gold ist der Reif geglüht.

Watching a DVD of the New York Metropolitan’s version of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (or Twilight of the Gods [TOG]) the other day, I was struck at how prescient the otherwise reactionary composer was in anticipating the destruction of the voracious classes. (One should not find it odd that in Wagner one finds mixed the most progressive and the most reactionary of views and trends, as in this he is the exemplar of the age, which mixes reason and progress with vile reaction, destruction, and mass murder.)

Dick Cheney, who is Alberich in my analogy with Wagner’s opera, was on the stump beating war tom-toms against Iran during a 35-minute talk at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which The New York Times calls “a research organization”. In reality, WINEP is a well-known right-wing pro-Israel lobby. While praised by liberal dreamboat Al Gore as “Washington’s most respected center for studies on the Middle East”, according to Right Web:

Oct 19 2007

Brits to investigate possible complicity in U.S. war crimes

The story, out of England, is pretty straight-forward, but the implications are stunning; or, they would be stunning, if the repeated crimes and inhumanity of the Bush Administration had not fried whatever synapses allow us to feel stunned.

The Guardian reports:

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.