‘UK blocking release of CIA black site torture records’
The British government is reportedly delaying the release of flight records that may give evidence of its overseas territory of Diego Garcia being once used by the US spy agency, CIA, for “torture flights.”
Reprieve, which advocates for prisoners’ human rights in Guantanamo and elsewhere, said the UK government admitted in 2008 that Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian Ocean, was used by two CIA rendition jets carrying prisoners in 2002.
With the release of the US Senate torture report last December, it was revealed that the CIA flew captives to secret prisons, known as black sites, across the globe as part of its rendition program.
Although it has been known for years the CIA has used the island for rendition, the British government has failed to publish flight records which could provide clues into how the site was used and who was taken there, Reprieve argues.
“It is now over seven years since the UK government was forced to admit that CIA torture flights were allowed to use the British territory of Diego Garcia, yet we still seem no closer to the publication of flight records which could provide crucial evidence of what went on,” RT quoted Donald Campbell from Reprieve as saying.
Now, Lee Jasper, human rights activist in London, believes: “The whole issue of Chagos Islands (of which Diego Garcia is a part) is a deep stain on the British date and British foreign policy. Here we have an island that was cleared of its original inhabitants, leased out to American army naval bases and then used as a site to conduct black torture.”
“The reason why the records aren’t being revealed is because we all expect that they would reveal Britain’s implicit involvement in the torture and illegal human rights breaches of many people who were forcibly rendered to that island,” Jasper told Press TV on Friday.
In July 2014, the government claimed the CIA flight records had suffered “water damage.”
A former senior official in the administration of George W. Bush recently admitted that interrogations took place at a CIA black site on the island.
MTM/GHN
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