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Hidden from Parliament and the U.S. Congress, the deal was this: the Americans wanted the island, in their words, “swept and sanitized.” An entire population was declared expendable; all of them were to be deported.

Stealing a Nation (John Pilger, 2004) is an extraordinary film about the plight of people of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean – secretly and brutally expelled from their homeland by British governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to make way for an American military base. The base, on the main island of Diego Garcia, was a launch pad for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.