Political moment

This blog post about an 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]

Can you say new vacation spot?!?! how about NO?!?!?! Hellz to the
Nizawww!!!

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]
Diego Garcia
is a coral atoll in the Indian Ocean south of Sri Lanka. With a huge central
lagoon protected on three sides by land, it’s an equatorial paradise which could
have inspired Blue Lagoon. 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.:

All I'm saying is ya'll put him back in office not me.... But that's to say our military officers tell the president everything that goes on - people get so bent out of shpae when you hold the president accountable - but well... damn he's the president. And there is no way you gonna tell me he doesn't know some shadyness is going on on that island. Now if this was some equal opportunity detention and they had a bunch of boys who look like Timmothy Mcvey, and the American taliban kid ... what's his name....John Walker, I might not feel such a sense of dred everytime they show pictures of the London bombers and they look like they could have been at the Sugarwater show Sunday, in their Polo and Gap clothes. The tag terrorist has just jumped from peanut butter brown people to all brown people, and they fail to realialise there are scores of Caucasian muslims, and scores of people who hate the U.S without a religious flag to fly, whether they be African, Asian, Middle Eastern, European , or American born. There has got to be another way. I don't know what it is, but the current plan just isn't working.