MH370: Brits' Hand In Diego Garcia CIA Black Ops 'Far Beyond Complicity'

On the heels of Prince Williams “disappearing” three weeks off-radar after his Maldives holiday last month that began the day MH370 also “disappeared,” a Senate report surfaced Thursday claiming the British government allowed the CIA to run a “black” jail on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

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‘Far beyond complcity’

The report, based on leaked accounts of a US Senate investigation into the CIA’s kidnap and torture programme after 9/11, contradicts years of British government denials that it allowed the US to use Diego Garcia for its “extraordinary rendition” torture programme.

The Diego Garcia black site held “high-value” detainees with the “full co-operation” of the British government, according to Al Jazeera America, quoting US officials familiar with the Senate report.

Last night Minister of Parliament William Hague, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs since 2010, faced demands from international and British lawyers representing CIA “extraordinary rendition” programme victims to urgently clarify the new allegations in a letter from Reprieve, the legal charity representing several rendition victims.

“We need to know immediately whether ministers misled Parliament over CIA torture on British soil,” said Cori Crider, Reprieve’s strategic director.

“If the CIA operated a black site on Diego Garcia, then a string of official statements, from both this and the last government, were totally false. Were ministers asleep at the wheel? Or, as the report suggests, have we been lied to for years?” The new details could be confirmed within weeks after the US Senate voted last week to declassify a 500-page summary of its three-year investigation in the CIA kidnap and torture programme that examined some six million classified documents.

A report summary is now with the White House, that has said it is determined to release it to the public, subject to national security considerations. It remains unclear how if the CIA, that has fought bitterly against publication, will succeed in having it redacted.

“Claims of the British being fully aware of a Diego Garcia black site chimes with claims by a security source to The Daily Telegraph last weekend that Tony Blair and senior government ministers, including Jack Straw, were briefed in detail and “every step of the way” on the CIA rendition programme,” reports the Telegraph.

Amrit Singh, senior lawyer with the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative and author of Administration of Torture, a book detailing the Bush administration’s torture policy, said the Al Jazeera report clearly suggested UK involvement with the CIA programme went far beyond tacit complicity.

“The fact that this says it was being done with full co-operation’ of the British government suggests that the British government knew exactly what was happening on its territory and is therefore liable for the secret detention,” she said.

The role of Diego Garcia in the CIA programme has been under scrutiny since 2006 and came back into the headlines after top secret documents found in Libya in 2011 showed Diego Garcia being listed on a CIA rendition flight plan for a Libyan Islamist Abdel-Hakim Belhadj and his wife Fatima Boudchar in March 2004.

Scotland Yard is investigating whether criminal charges should be laid against MI6 officers and anyone else complicit in the rendition of Mr Belhadj and another Libyan Islamist Sami al-Saadi, who was paid a £2.2m “no fault” settlement by the British government in 2012.

After the Tripoli documents were made public by Human Rights Watch the Foreign Office issued a statement again denying Diego Garcia had been a rendition stop.

“No flights with a detainee on board landed on Diego Garcia in March 2004,” said David Lidington, a minister of state at the Foreign Office, in a written parliamentary answer of December 2012 in response to a question about the Tripoli documents.

The answer added that, aside from two acknowledged cases of rendition through Diego Garcia in 2002, there were “no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the UK, our Overseas Territories, or the Crown Dependencies, with a detainee, on board since 11 September 2001.”

In a letter to Mr Hague seen by The Daily Telegraph lawyers at Reprieve asking the foreign office both to confirm the truth of its early statements and clarify whether – if rendition flights were not allowed to land at Diego Garcia in March 2004 – it was because of concerns over earlier detentions.

Responding to the letter, an Foreign Office spokesman declined to elaborate, saying only: “I refer you to statements we’ve made in the past on this issue.”

The UK’s alleged direct support of Diego Garcia black operations supports the theory that Prince William, a Search and Rescue Captain in the Royal Air Force, spent up to three weeks at the site last month. A host of media reports contradicted each other regarding his whereabouts for three weeks after he landed in the Maldives the same day MH370 “disappeared” and remained in the Indian Ocean vicinity after his wife, Kate Middleton left the Maldives.

In the article by this author, Prince William’s 3-Wk MH370-Diego Garcia SAR Military Tour?, it is reported:

The three-week whereabouts reported for William are not only fuzzy, they are contradictory and surprised even reporters whose beat is the royal family. William unexctadly left the UK for a so-called ”romantic holiday” in the Maldives, a vacation that began the same day MH370 went missing. From the time that “four day” or “one week” vacation eneded through one month to the day later, when he arrived in Wellington, it is speculated the mystery time was spent at the UK’s island that it leases to the United States, Diego Garcia.  

 

Britain and the United States are the main two partners in the ‘Five-Eyes’ intelligence-sharing alliance,