Some islands are better than others, and some are just bad. Diego Garcia was once an uninhabited atoll sitting in the Indian Ocean about a 1000 miles from anywhere else. Effectively paradise.
Sometime in the 1700’s the French decided to ‘populate’ the island with plantations and the requisite slave labor needed for the operation of these businesses. That’s bad, but no as bad as it gets.
The island was forcibly depopulated beginning in 1971 when the United States struck a deal with the British for a US military base that can and has been used as a base for B-52’s, B-1’s and other aircraft needed for US efforts in far-flung parts of the globe that might otherwise be inconveniently out of the reach of our ordinance.
If all that is not bad enough, The Guardian recently adds that Diego Garcia may also house a secret CIA jail used to interrogate terror suspects. An interesting aspect of all this, from my point of view, is how these stories fail to garner any ink back here at the source, in the United States.