Adam Zagorin in a story at Time magazine and the BBC’s "Newsnight" have today given fresh ammunition to the long-held view of human rights advocates and European investigators that the United States has used and may be continuing to use the British-owned atoll of Diego Garcia and its territorial waters as a rendition hub and detention center for suspected terrorists. Whether suspects have been tortured there remains unknown, but this also is widely suspected.
Source: British Territory Used for US Terror Interrogation
According to a former senior American official, it appears another locale can be added to the international roster of interrogation sites — one both more obscure and potentially more controversial than the alleged sites in Poland and Romania. The source tells TIME that, in 2002 and possibly 2003, the U.S. imprisoned and interrogated one or more terrorist suspects on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean controlled by the United Kingdom.
The official, a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings after Sept. 11 who has since left government, says a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being held and interrogated on the island. The identity of the captive or captives was not made clear. According to this account, the CIA officer surprised attendees by volunteering the information, apparently to demonstrate that the agency was doing its best to obtain valuable intelligence. According to this single source, who requested anonymity because of the classified nature of the discussions, the U.S. may also have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia's territorial waters, a contention the U.S. has long denied. The White House meetings were also attended by a variety of other senior counter-terrorism officials.
Zagorin also spoke to Richard Clarke, a counter-terrorism expert who worked for Bill Clinton and a year for George W. Bush. Clarke, who has sharply criticized the Bush administration since his departure in 2003, told Time: "Given everything that we know about the Administration's approach to the law on these matters, I find the report that the U.S. did use the island for detention or interrogation entirely credible." If the island were used for interrogations or detentions without British approval, Clarke added, it "is a violation of U.K. law, as well as of the bi-lateral agreement governing the island."
In response to the BBC and Time stories, Frank Donaghue, Chief Executive Officer of Physicians for Human Rights, called for an investigation by U.S. Congress and Parliament to hold CIA Director Michael Hayden and other senior Bush officials "accountable" and to determine what members and former members of the British government knew and when they knew it about what was happening on Diego Garcia. He also called for Red Cross access to all prisoners at Diego Garcia and other "black sites." (Here is a video link to his statement.)
"The US and the UK must at last come clean about the scope of extraordinary rendition and secret detention—a violation of American and British law, human rights standards, and the rules and regulations of NATO. ... Both Congress and Parliament must set the record straight about what happened at Diego Garcia. PHR knows from our twenty-one year history of documenting torture around the world that secret detention opens the floodgates to torture and other gross human rights abuses." ...
"The Bush Administration's detainee treatment and interrogation policies have damaged our nation's reputation as human rights leader. ... Seven years of secrets whispered in secret rooms must give way to on-the-record testimony and open hearings."
The United States has repeatedly denied using the island it leases from Britain for such purposes. Top British officials have parroted those denials every time the subject comes up. In February, however, in a moment of "gross embarrassment" for the Labor government, Foreign Secretary David Miliband was forced to apologize to Parliament because the United States had admitted that a review of old records showed it had twice used Diego Garcia as refueling stops while rendering suspected terrorists. Members of all three major parties were not pleased, and a House of Commons Human Rights Report issued early this month used strong language to describe the situation and to demand a thorough inquiry.
If the latest revelations pan out that U.S. officials used Diego Garcia for detention and possibly torture and then lied about it to their British counterparts, a major diplomatic incident could be in the offing. If it were to turn out the British were secretly told about rendition and detention on the island, the political consequences could well be worse. Whichever, Miliband – already under fire within the party for alleged disloyalty to Prime Minister Gordon Brown – is certain to find himself a target of sharp criticism in this matter. So may Brown himself.
No telling what the reaction will be on this side of the Atlantic, where years of knowledge about extraordinary rendition, torture, secret prisons and lying about them has yet to produce the requisite level of rage to generate any effective political reaction.
The administration reaction was predictable. The State Department told the BBC today:
"The CIA and the Department of Defense categorically deny having interrogated any terrorist suspects or terrorism-related detainee on Diego Garcia in any cases since September 11, 2001. With the exceptions of the two cases in 2002, in which detainees transited Diego Garcia that previously have been disclosed to the UK Government, there have been no other instances in which terrorist suspects or terrorism-related detainees transited or were held there."
An outright lie if Zagorin’s source has it right.
In the story, Time names three suspects who may have been at Diego Garcia. The first two of these were originally reported by the U.K. human rights group Reprieve:
Kuwaiti-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of involvement in several bombings, including the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Bali disco bombing in 2002. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and turned over to American authorities. Since 2006, he has been held at the United States Naval Base Guantánamo Bay where he was tortured by means of waterboarding and is said to have confessed to several plots, including the ’93 bombing.
Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born associate of Osama bin Laden known for his skill with heavy weapons who became the top military strategist for al Qaeda in November 2001. He was captured in 2002, transferred to an unknown secret CIA prison and later to Thailand where he was waterboarded. His "confessions" have come under sharp criticism, not only for how they were obtained but for the quality of information they provide. He is now at Guantánamo Bay
Time reported five years ago that Hambali had been held at Diego Garcia. The real name of the Indonesian-born leader of the organization Jemaah Islamiyah is Riduan Isamuddin. He is a suspect in many bombings, including the 2002 attack on the Bali disco, in which 202 people were killed. He is currently detained at Guantánamo Bay.
The BBC reported that one of its sources, the Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who investigated al Qaeda links to the March 11, 2004, Madrid train bombings, said he had been told that suspected terrorist Mustafa Setmarian Nasar was detained and interrogated on Diego Garcia after his arrest in Pakistan in 2005. After being turned over to U.S. authorities, he joined the ranks of the disappeared, a "ghost prisoner" whose whereabouts today are unknown.
Add to those four names that of suspected 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh. The Yemen-born bin al-Shibh was captured in Pakistan on September 11, 2002, and held for several years at an undisclosed location, then transferred to Guantánamo Bay. That location was Diego Garcia, according to author Stephen Grey in his 2006 book, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program.
If there were these, it seems only prudent to suspect there were others.
For nearly six years, human rights groups have been saying the United States uses the atoll as a secret CIA detention and interrogation center for suspected terrorists and has rendered some of them from the island to third countries where they face the likelihood of torture. Some have suggested that the CIA might have tortured prisoners on Diego Garcia itself.
Britain expelled the 2000 residents of Diego Garcia to the Seychelles between 1968 and 1973, and then on to Mauritius. While Britain maintains sovereignty, it has leased the atoll rent-free to the United States since 1966. Starting in the 1970s, the U.S. has turned the place into a major base for the Navy and Air Force, part of a "lily pad" style of strategic basing, the idea for which arose in the 1960s as former colonies around the world gained independence. About 1700 U.S. military personnel are stationed there, along with 1500 contractors and 50 Britons.
In December 2002, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who four years later won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on rendition and secret prisons, mentioned Diego Garcia as a detention and interrogation center.
This sparked a letter from Human Rights Watch to British Prime Minister Tony Blair noting that Britain would be complicit in torture if it allowed the practice on British soil, including in its overseas territories.
In March 2005, Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group, issued its scorching Behind the Wire report, stating, "The U.S. government is holding prisoners in a secret system of offshore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability or law." The Abu Ghraib abuses reported the previous year, the report said were "just the tip of the iceberg."
In June 2005, the United Nations special rapporteur on terrorism spoke of prisoners being held on ships in the Indian Ocean. In 2006 and again in 2007, in its report on European complicity in rendition and detention, the Council of Europe stated that Diego Garcia had been or was still being used to detain prisoners. Again, the usual denials. These in spite of the fact that a retired U.S. general, Barry McCaffrey, had said in May 2004 and December 2006 that the island was being used for these purposes.
In response to concerns raised in Parliament, Labor leaders have repeatedly said they were given "categorical assurances" by Washington that the remote island was being used neither for rendition nor detention. No need to investigate further, they said.
It was thus a major red-face moment for Miliband last February when Washington admitted that a search of its records indicated two rendition flights had refueled at Diego Garcia. Sorry, said CIA Director Michael Hayden, a mistake was made. Miliband offered a public apology. Not the most pleasant duty for the Foreign Secretary to have to deal with given that the U.S.-U.K. alliance supposedly is built on trust.
Hayden’s comment included:
In fact, on two different occasions in 2002, an American plane with a detainee aboard stopped briefly in Diego Garcia for refuelling.
Neither of those individuals was ever part of CIA's high-value terrorist interrogation program. One was ultimately transferred to Guantanamo, and the other was returned to his home country.
These were rendition operations, nothing more. There has been speculation in the press over the years that CIA had a holding facility on Diego Garcia. That is false. There have also been allegations that we transport detainees for the purpose of torture. That, too, is false. [My emphasis - MB]
Torture is against our laws and our values. And, given our mission, CIA could have no interest in a process destined to produce bad intelligence.
Interviewed by the BBC Thursday, Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democratic leader in Britain, was asked if he thought British officials had been duped by the Americans. "We don’t know," he said, noting that the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition has set its sights on Diego Garcia but is still being stonewalled.
Campbell asked what the reaction would be if the situation were reversed and the U.S. Senate were looking into similar British behavior on U.S. soil. It would be encouraging to be able to say to Sir Menzies that outrage and demands for action would carry the day. But even after the past 18 months of Democratic control of Congress, who can argue that such would be the case? Certainly knowledge of rendition, waterboarding, secret detention and other actions have generated little more than a whimper so far.
