Wikileaks cables ‘wrongly' proscribed from court case that saw Chagos refugees denied the right to return to their homeland, which now hosts a US torture camp.

A UK case by the Chagos Refugees Group, who were expelled from their homeland to make space for a US air base in 1971, failed to overturn a Court of Appeal decision that ‘there was no improper motive’ behind island’s acquisition by the US military.

However, the Supreme Court ‘unanimously held’ that Wikileaks-obtained diplomatic cables, which were rejected as evidence during the case, should have been permitted. The cables in question show that the UK contrived to set up a ‘marine protected area’ that would ‘effectively end the islanders' resettlement claims’ without affecting the US airbase.

The UK leased the atoll of Diego Garcia to the US military in 1966 in return for a $11 million discount on their purchase of a Polaris nuclear missile system. The airbase has proved extremely useful for the US extraordinary rendition program, with several abductees tortured on the island while other black sites were too ‘dangerous or insecure’, according to former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson.

The use of of the UK overseas territory for US torture was denied by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the time, before his successor David Miliband admitted that ‘two rendition flights stopped there to refuel’. A report later published by the US Senate intelligence committee, however, contradicted both UK ministers in admitting that several cases of torture occurred on Diego Garcia.

Between 1968 and 1971 nearly 2,000 native Chagos Islanders were expelled from their homeland and largely migrated to nearby Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they overwhelmingly experience discrimination and serious poverty. In 2016 the UK Foreign Office issued an apology to the Chagos Refugees Group, but declared that returning Chagossians to their homeland would be ‘prohibitively expensive’.

Wikileaks released a cache of diplomatic cables obtained by whistleblower Chelsea Manning in 2010. This trove included 09LONDON1156_a, which suggested that the UK purposely endeavoured to create a marine reserve on the island in order to make it ‘difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement’, allowing the US to continue waterboarding Iraqis in peace without any natives hanging around or getting up in their hair.

Naturally, the Chagos Refugee Group thought that this cable, which clearly refutes then Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s claims that he marine reserve on Chagos constituted a ‘major step forward for protecting the oceans’ rather than a cynical political ploy, would prove useful in their court case against the UK government. The verified diplomatic cables were suspiciously blocked from being used as evidence, a decision that the Supreme Court have ruled is completely unjustified.

The Foreign Office of the UK, both past and present, must be extremely relieved.

David Miliband now heads the International Rescue Committee, a charity which claims to assist refugees ‘displaced by war, persecution or natural disaster’ according to their manifesto. Conveniently for Miliband, 'refugees displaced by a imperial occupier who sold their homeland to the US military machine’ isn’t included under their remit, as this would constitute a conflict of interest.

A member of the Rockefeller Trilateral Commission, Miliband earns £20,000 per night on the after dinner speech circuit and is good mates with George Clooney. Call it bitterness, but I can’t escape the sneaky feeling that he may have got off lightly for his past transgressions.

You can find the UK Chagos Support Association on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/ChagosUK