From Andy Worthington Author and Journalist
By Andy Worthington

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, is to be commended for his confession on Thursday that US “extraordinary rendition” flights had refuelled twice at an airbase on the British colonial territory of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. Leased to the US in the 1960s, in exchange for cut-price nuclear weapons, the island is effectively under US control, although it remains a British sovereign territory, and the British government maintains a small base on the island, which houses 50 military personnel.

It would be slightly churlish to point out that Mr. Miliband only made his confession because he was shamed into it through the persistent pressure exerted on the government by Reprieve, the London-based legal charity that provides frontline investigation and legal representation to prisoners held without trial in the “War on Terror,” and by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, led by the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie. Last October, Reprieve published a report on the use of Diego Garcia as a secret prison, and the parliamentary group used the Freedom of Information Act to request the minutes of discussions between the British and American governments in Washington last September, which were refused by the British government on the grounds that releasing the information “would prejudice the defence” of territory by “exposing plans to counter possible terrorist attacks.” Just three weeks ago, Mr. Tyrie pledged to appeal against the Foreign Office’s decision, and Mr. Miliband’s confession therefore appears to have been timed to put some distance between the government and its increasingly vocal critics.

There are, however, two simple reasons for not bashing Mr. Miliband too hard: firstly, because any confession, however forced, is better than none at all, and secondly, because it also highlights the evasiveness of other senior government figures — step forward, former PM Tony Blair and former foreign secretary Jack Straw — who maintained between 2005 and 2007 that nothing of the sort had ever happened.

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