Claims of secret CIA jail for terror suspects on British island to be investigated

[Coexist]

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called "black site" prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.

Lawyers from Reprieve, a legal charity that represents a number of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including several former British residents, are calling on the committee to question US and British officials about the allegations. According to the organisation's submission to the committee, the UK government is "potentially systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention".

<snip>
Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general who is professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, has twice spoken publicly about the use of Diego Garcia to detain suspects. In May 2004 he said: "We're probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq." In December last year he repeated the claim: "They're behind bars...we've got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo."

<snip>
A prison of some sort is known to exist on Diego Garcia: in 1984, a review by the US government's general accounting office of construction work on the island reported that a "detention facility" had been completed the previous December. British ministers have also disclosed that a building on the island was redesignated as a prison after the September 11 attacks.

the rest...

Please read the entire article from the Guardian - especially these two areas:

- that the U.S. may be getting around some U.K. laws by detaining prisoners aboard ship and being "beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo."

- the 'At a Glance' section at the bottom of the article about the relocation of the indigenous population of Diego Garcia that the U.S. and British governments refer to as "temporary workers".

[Coexist]

1. The Independant: "Has Britain been complicit in a US torture programme?"

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article3067211.ece

"Should Britain be found to have played a complicit role in the use of torture or other breaches of human rights undertaken by American forces in Diego Garcia, then ministers could be held to account in a UK court of law or even face charges at the International Criminal Court."

[Coexist]

2. .