CBS reported last week on allegations that U.S. authorities held terrorist suspects on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia as part of a secret prisons network. Diego Garcia, an island of great apparent beauty, is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. What goes on there is the business of Westminster.

The UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select committee have received a report from the charity Reprieve that details the involvement of the British territory and British officials in illegal CIA activities on the island. Assurances received from the US government about these activities have received little credence from British MPs. Andrew Tyrie, a conservative who has led investigations looking at other British involvements said:

“These assurances come from the same government that invented the rendition program, authorized the use of techniques that all in the civilized world would call torture, and continues to hold hundreds in the moral and legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay,”

Meanwhile, in Italy the trial of CIA agents accused of kidnap continues in absentia.

And, Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane, has published an excellent article on rendition as experienced by refugees following the recent US military intervention in Somalia.

Update: Amnesty International are calling for other european governments to initiate independent investigations into their involvement in the US-led programme of renditions and secret detention. See Denmark: Authorities must come clean about renditions