High Value Processing

An all-party committee is to investigate the possibility that Diego Garcia, the island stolen from its inhabitants by the British government and leased to the US military in return for a discount on our membership costs in Uncle Sam's Nuclear Nations club, has been used by the CIA as one of its "black sites". The Americans have "repeatedly given assurances" that combatants from the wrong side of the war on evil have not been held on Diego Garcia, but a retired general and professor of international security studies at West Point has twice mentioned Bagram airfield, the Guantánomaly and Diego Garcia as places of rendition for the evilly disposed. Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, recently investigated the CIA's use of European territory for its personnel-oriented memory holes, and reported to the Council of Europe that "We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the 'processing' of high-value detainees"; which is just what one would expect from a cuckoo-clock eating neutrality monkey. Meanwhile, the Guardian notes blithely that any evidence "pointing to the existence of a secret CIA prison on the island would be hugely embarrassing for ministers". This seems a little optimistic. There might be some annoyance at yet another public-relations failure; but if our ministers had even a residual capacity for embarrassment, their average time in office would be a good deal lower and their suicide rate a good deal higher.