Word: garcia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...officer surprised attendees by volunteering the information, apparently to demonstrate that the agency was doing its best to obtain valuable intelligence. According to this single source, who requested anonymity because of the classified nature of the discussions, the U.S. may also have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia's territorial waters, a contention the U.S. has long denied. The White House meetings were also attended by a variety of other senior counterterrorism officials...
...TIME discussed the allegation with Richard Clarke, who served as a special adviser to Bush on the National Security Council dealing with counterterrorism until 2003 but is not the source for this story. "In my presence, in the White House, the possibility of using Diego Garcia for detaining high-value targets was discussed," he says. Clarke did not witness a final resolution of the issue, but adds, "Given everything that we know about the Administration's approach to the law on these matters, I find the report that the U.S. did use the island for detention or interrogation entirely credible...
...Since leaving the White House, Clarke has written Against All Enemies, a scathing critique of the Bush Administration's handling of the war on terrorism. Clarke, who was in charge of U.S.-U.K. cooperation on Diego Garcia in the early '90s, says using the island for interrogations or detentions without British permission "is a violation of U.K. law, as well as of the bilateral agreement governing the island...
...Diego Garcia is a tiny island, but its use by the U.S. as a detention or interrogation site has global significance. While the governments of Poland and Romania have faced few domestic consequences for their rumored cooperation with U.S. counterterrorism measures, many in Britain have been voluble in their opposition to what they see as the U.S.'s abrogation of human rights as well as violations of law and British sovereignty. Says the chief spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: "Our intelligence and counterterrorism relationship with the U.S. is vital to the national security of the United Kingdom...
...spokesman says there have been no changes in the agency's position on Diego Garcia since February 2008, when CIA director Michael Hayden admitted that the agency's previous denials about U.S. activities on the island were incorrect. Hayden acknowledged then that the U.S. had inadvertently misled the British government and that two suspects had been on flights that stopped to refuel on Diego Garcia en route to Guantánamo Bay and Morocco in 2002. "Neither of those individuals was ever part of CIA's high-value terrorist-interrogation program," said Hayden. "These were rendition operations, nothing more." Hayden...