From a new book, Freedom Next Time, by John Pilger, excerpted in The Guardian, comes news of government intrigue and mendacity so extreme that it surprises even me. Until this report, I'd never heard a word of the forcible deportation of the entire population of the island of Diego Garcia and its subsequent illegal sale to the US.

What happened in the Chagos Islands was so searing, it may seem barely credible. Indeed La Lutte, as the Chagossians call their struggle for justice and freedom, arose from a crime that allows us to glimpse how great power works behind its respectable, democratic facade and how governments justify their actions with lies.

During the 1960s and 1970s, British governments, both Labour and Tory, tricked and expelled the entire population of the Chagos, a British colonial dependency, so that their homeland could be given to a foreign power, the United States, as the site for a military base. This "act of mass kidnapping", as one observer describes it, was carried out in high secrecy, along with the conspiracy that preceded it.

For almost a decade, neither parliament nor the US Congress knew anything about it, and no journalist revealed it. BBC newsreaders still refer to US aircraft flying out to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq from the "uninhabited" island of Diego Garcia. Not only was the Chagossians' homeland stolen from them, but they were taken out of history. This scandal is unresolved today – even though the high court in London has twice ruled that the islanders' "wholesale removal" was an "abject legal failure".

Here is a slideshow of the current inhabitants, US military personnel. It sure does look nice there!