Diego Garcia

This has been a bad week for the British government, in relation to two of the running sores of its foreign policy, both centred on the Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands — known collectively as the Chagos Islands — were shamefully cleared of their existing population [...]

On Tuesday, Binyam Mohamed, a 29-year old British resident in Guantánamo, sued the British government for refusing to produce evidence which, his lawyers contend, would demonstrate that he was tortured for 27 months by or on behalf of US forces in Morocco and Afghanistan, that any “evidence” against him was only obtained through torture, and [...]

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, is to be commended for his confession on Thursday that US “extraordinary rendition” flights had refuelled twice at an airbase on the British colonial territory of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. Leased to the US in the 1960s, in exchange for cut-price nuclear weapons, the island is effectively [...]

One of the more sordid and long-running stories in Anglo-American colonial history –- that of Diego Garcia, the chief island of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean –- reared its ugly head again on Friday when the UK’s all-party foreign affairs committee announced plans to investigate long-standing allegations that the CIA has, since 2002, [...]