torture island Diego Garcia, torture, and the tsunami (Camp Justice)

[donsu]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=2102

Self-Portrait with Shackles for the Year 2005

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Only one small spot in the vast Indian Ocean basin "seems to have received full advanced warning of the waves to come -- the ostensibly British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually a sizeable U.S. military base, a stationary "aircraft carrier" for the war in Iraq. It also houses "Camp Justice," one of the secret little hideaway resorts the administration has set up, or contracted out for, on prime global real estate to hold "high value" prisoners in the war on terror. The camp, named by someone who must have had a yen for the Orwellian, is part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by the Bush administration -- two interlinked prison systems, in fact; one run by the Pentagon and the other by the CIA, both meant to keep prisoners and practices far from the prying eyes of the American public and its court system; both, as it now turns out, anchored in that jewel-in-the-crown, Guantanamo (or Gitmo to devotees) -- a grim prison camp set up on territory in Cuba that is close at hand, U.S.-controlled, and yet -- or so Bush officials hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year -- beyond the reach of our courts.

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Devil's Island, USA

There's something, I suppose, that just hates a secret -- and so, as the year of Abu Ghraib ended, ever more of America's secret world of torture (generally called "abuse" in our press) has been tumbling out of the darkness and into the news -- thanks largely to leaks from anonymous but obviously angry sources inside the military and the intelligence "community." For instance, in December we learned from Dana Priest and Scott Higham of the Washington Post, which has been doing the best of this reporting in the mainstream, that deep in the heart of our Guantanamo prison camp was a super-secret CIA wing built in the last year for high-value prisoners previously being passed from place to place globally, "a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public."

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Let's recall for a moment what our President had to say at a news conference about such accusation of torture last June: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government."

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But I get ahead of myself. I was talking about the extraordinarily rendited island of Diego Garcia when I wandered off into the imperial dark side. We only know what the military tells us -- no damage -- about the effects of the tsunami on that very low-lying island, only on average 4 feet above sea level, but that's not so odd. The island has been a blacked-out area, a zone of silence in the Indian Ocean ever since, to oblige us Yanks, the Brits shipped all the Diego Garcians off into misery and poverty on the island of Mauritius, clearing the decks for us

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It's a grim tale and one of the main figures who made it possible will, in the coming days, be given a pass by Democratic senators. Imagine that. Alberto Gonzales, the lawyer who sponsored a regime of torture for his President, will soon become the nation's attorney general. Perhaps it's fitting. Then the Justice Department can enter the same world of twisted names as Camp Justice, saved from the tsunami's surprise impact by a special Pentagon warning. When you think about it, we are still living in the ruins of the World Trade Center.
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we are living in the wasteland of the 2000 coup d'etat


I'd be pissed if I lived in one of the countries who did not get a warning from the Pentagon.

who do they have imprisoned on Diego Garcia?