Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 - Missing Plane

[GRiM]

I thought this was worth posting here;

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA—Following a host of conflicting reports in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 last Saturday, representatives from the Kuala Lumpur–based carrier acknowledged they had widened their investigation into the vanished Boeing 777 aircraft today to encompass not only the possibilities of mechanical failure, pilot error, terrorist activity, or a botched hijacking, but also the overarching scope of space, time, and humankind’s place in the universe.
(...)
Rahman assured the press and families of passengers that officials would not rest until they locate the plane, provided that sensory experience can be verified beyond the existence of one’s own mind. Malaysian authorities also cautioned that they were dealing with an unprecedented aviation mystery and that it could take months to ascertain the airliner’s exact fate as well as, for that matter, the fate of mankind itself, assuming a linear theory of space-time in which the future is unknowable and objects travel in a forward trajectory which, authorities hasten to add, is not necessarily the case.

:)

 

[angelburst29]

Quote:
"The USS Kidd, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, joined the USS Pinckney in the search effort, according to the U.S. 7th Fleet. Both destroyers were conducting training in the South China Sea when they were dispatched to aid the search.

_http://presstv.com/detail/2014/03/14/354583/bankers-behind-ukraine-crisis-analyst/

Washington has also sent US fighter jets to allied countries located near Ukraine. Meanwhile, a US Navy guided-missile destroyer has started joint training drills with Romanian and Bulgarian naval forces in the Black Sea, across the water from Crimea.

Comment: Same M.O. in my opinion? Start joint training drills, as an excuse to be in a certain prime location, stratedgy speaking.

With Crimea, a U.S. Navy guided-missle destroyer (the USS Truxtun) in the Black Sea.

With China, a U.S. Navy guided-missle destroyer(s) (the USS Pinckney, The USS Kidd) in South China Sea.

_http://presstv.com/detail/2014/03/11/354266/us-drills-meant-to-intimidate-russia/

The planned joint military training exercises in the Black Sea, across the water from the autonomous Ukrainian region of Crimea, are pure mischief-making by the United States to intimidate) Russia, an American political commentator says.

As the tension between Russia and Ukraine simmers over the future of Crimea, the US is set to start joint military training drills in the region on Tuesday.

According to the US Navy, the USS Truxtun, a US Navy guided-missile destroyer, would conduct training with Romanian and Bulgarian naval forces.

 

[Laura]

Now, the fact that they have come up with this REALLY makes me suspicious:

FIRST ON CNN: A classified analysis of electronic and satellite data conducted by the United States and Malaysian governments shows Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 likely crashed into the Indian Ocean on one of two flight paths, CNN has learned. One flight path suggests the plane crashed into the Bay of Bengal off the coast of India; the other has it traveling southeast and crashing elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, according to the analysis.

The Boeing 777-200ER with 239 passengers and crew members aboard departed Kuala Lumpur at 12:41 a.m. on March 8 in good weather. It was expected to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. Air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane about 2:40 a.m.

If they don't find debris pretty quick, I'm thinking it went into an alternate dimension.

 

[Laura]

They've had enough time now to cook up a story, prepare some debris and stuff to "find". That's what that back and forth nonsense was about... them cooking up a story.

Those phones ringing mess up the whole thing.

 

[seek10]

Indian authorities who monitor air space of Andaman and Nicobar islands says They haven't seen any plane and plane can't land any where without their knowledge.

http://www.cnn.com/video/api/embed.html#/video/bestoftv/2014/03/14/malaysia-andaman-chronicle-reporter-giles-beeper-newday.cnn

 

[nicklebleu]

My Son served on the USS Pinckney, and shot Tomahawk Missiles. I would think they would be sending in Hospital ships for recovery....but Destroyers...has to be Military actions to come, yeah.

Maybe they want an excuse to assemble a fleet there?

Question then is ... against whom.

The Russians to distract them from the Ukraine? The Russian Pacific Fleet base in Vladivostok is half a world away. Unless they are planning an invasion and want to open multiple fronts at the same time to spread out the Russian forces.

China? Not sure Obama wants to seriously anger the Chinese, apart from the usual rethoric and posturing, becuase the Chinese have the Americans economically by the balls.

Nothing on the radar for me with regards to Thailand, Vietnam, Burma and Malaysia, they all seem to toe the partyline ...

 

[nicklebleu]

From the NYT:

SEPANG, Malaysia — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 experienced significant changes in altitude after it lost contact with ground control, and altered its course more than once as if still under the command of a pilot, American officials and others familiar with the investigation said Friday.

Radar signals recorded by the Malaysian military appear to show the missing airliner climbing to 45,000 feet, above the approved altitude limit for a Boeing 777-200, soon after it disappeared from civilian radar and made a sharp turn to the west, according to a preliminary assessment by a person familiar with the data.

The radar track, which the Malaysian government has not released but says it has provided to the United States and China, then shows the plane descending unevenly to 23,000 feet, below normal cruising levels, as it approached the densely populated island of Penang, one of the country’s largest. There, the plane turned from a southwest-bound course, climbed to a higher altitude and flew northwest over the Strait of Malacca toward the Indian Ocean.

Investigators have also examined data transmitted from the plane’s Rolls-Royce engines that shows it descending 40,000 feet in the space of a minute, according to a senior American official briefed on the investigation. But investigators do not believe the readings are accurate because the aircraft would most likely have taken longer to fall such a distance.

“A lot of stock cannot be put in the altitude data sent from the engines, one official said. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense.”

The data, while incomplete and difficult to interpret, could still provide critical new clues as investigators try to determine what happened on Flight 370, which disappeared early last Saturday carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

Malaysian and international investigators have said in recent days that the plane may have departed from its northerly flight route toward Beijing and headed west across the Malaysian peninsula just after it disappeared from civilian radar, its pilots stopped communicating with ground controllers and its transponders stopped transmitting data about its speed and location. The plane is also now thought to have continued flying for more than four hours after diverting its course, based on automated pings sent by onboard systems to satellites.

But the Malaysian military radar data, which local authorities have declined to provide to the public, added significant new information about the flight immediately after ground controllers lost contact with it. The combination of altitude changes and at least two significant course corrections could have a variety of explanations, including that a pilot or a hijacker intentionally diverted the plane, or that it flew unevenly without a pilot after the crew became disabled.

The erratic movements of the aircraft after it diverted course and flew over the country also raise questions about why the military did not respond to the flight emergency. Malaysian officials have acknowledged that military radar may have detected the plane, but have said they took no action because it did not appear hostile.

Seven days after the jet’s disappearance, Malaysian authorities have shared few details with American investigators, frustrating senior officials in Washington. “They’re keeping us at a distance,” one of the officials said.

But investigators in Malaysia and the United States recently began receiving additional data about the plane and anticipate receiving more over the weekend, according to a senior American official. “It’s gotten better and better every day,” the official said, referring to information from the plane’s manufacturer, satellites and military radar. “It should provide more clarity to the flight path. It’s not a given, but it’s a hope.”

Because the plane stopped transmitting its position about 40 minutes after takeoff, military radar recorded only an unidentified blip moving through Malaysian airspace. Certain weather conditions, and even flocks of birds, can occasionally cause radar blips that may be mistaken for aircraft. The Malaysian authorities said they were still studying the signals to determine whether they came from Flight 370.

But the person who examined the data said it leaves little doubt that the airliner flew near or through the southern tip of Thailand, then back across Peninsular Malaysia, near the city of Penang, and out over the sea again. That is in part because the data is based on signals recorded by two radar stations, at the Royal Malaysian Air Force’s Butterworth base on the peninsula’s west coast, near Penang, and at Kota Bharu, on the northeast coast. Two radars tracking a contact can significantly increase the reliability of the readings.

Also this manoeuvre could be used to disable the passengers - climb to 45'000 feet, depressurize cabin while the guys in the cockpit have oxygen masks on (according to an anonymous Malaysan pilot).

As an aside - there are two Ukrainian noted on the passenger manifest - Oleg Chustrak and Sergeii Daineka, but I was unable to find much about these two guys.

 

[Andrian]

My Son served on the USS Pinckney, and shot Tomahawk Missiles. I would think they would be sending in Hospital ships for recovery....but Destroyers...has to be Military actions to come, yeah.

Maybe they want an excuse to assemble a fleet there?

Question then is ... against whom.

The Russians to distract them from the Ukraine? The Russian Pacific Fleet base in Vladivostok is half a world away. Unless they are planning an invasion and want to open multiple fronts at the same time to spread out the Russian forces.

China? Not sure Obama wants to seriously anger the Chinese, apart from the usual rethoric and posturing, because the Chinese have the Americans economically by the balls.

Nothing on the radar for me with regards to Thailand, Vietnam, Burma and Malaysia, they all seem to toe the partyline ...

Maybe all this is just a show of distraction of the attention of this mysterious and tragic event,maybe with all this chaos and confusion they try to show somehow to the world that they are in "control " of the situation ,that they are doing something(a game of smoke and mirrors).Assuming that the plane has passed through an opened window towards an other dimension and some branch of the ptb know about this,with the huge resources at their disposal,they can easily create a good scenario to mislead and confuse all that at the moment are watching closely how the investigation of the disappearance of the plane proceeds: the stolen passports,the suspicious Iranians,now the gathering of the warships seems to me just a show of divertion of the attention from the true mystery regarding the disappearance of the flight 370.

 

[Niall]

Interesting development:

Satellite Data Reveal Route of Missing Malaysia Airlines Plane

Jetliner 'Pinged' Satellites With Location, Altitude for Hours After Disappearance

By Jon Ostrower, Andy Pasztor and Julian E. Barnes

March 14, 2014 - Wall street Journal

Malaysia Airlines' missing jet transmitted its location repeatedly to satellites over the course of five hours after it disappeared from radar, people briefed on the matter said, as searchers zeroed in on new target areas hundreds of miles west of the plane's original course.

The satellites also received speed and altitude information about the plane from its intermittent "pings," the people said. The final ping was sent from over water, at what one of these people called a normal cruising altitude. They added that it was unclear why the pings stopped. One of the people, an industry official, said it was possible that the system sending them had been disabled by someone on board.

The people, who included a military official, the industry official and others, declined to say what specific path the transmissions revealed. But the U.S. planned to move surveillance planes into an area of the Indian Ocean 1,000 miles or more west of the Malay peninsula where the plane took off, said Cmdr. William Marks, the spokesman for the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

He said the destroyer USS Kidd would move through the Strait of Malacca, on Malaysia's west coast, and stay at its northwest entrance. Malaysia, which is overseeing the search effort, directed Indian forces to a specific set of coordinates in the Andaman Sea, northwest of the Malay peninsula, an Indian official said Thursday. "There was no specified rationale behind looking in those areas, but a detailed list was provided late Wednesday evening," the Indian official said.

The automatic pings, or attempts to link up with satellites operated by Inmarsat PLC, occurred a number of times after Flight 370's last verified position, the people briefed on the situation said, indicating that at least through those five hours, the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people remained intact and hadn't been destroyed in a crash, act of sabotage or explosion.

Malaysia Airlines said it hadn't received any such data. According to Boeing, the plane's manufacturer, the airline didn't purchase a package through Boeing to monitor its airplanes' data through the satellite system.

Malaysia Airlines said Friday that it has the required maintenance program in place for its Boeing 777, without elaborating.

If the plane remained airborne for the entire five hours, it could have flown more than 2,200 nautical miles from its last confirmed position over the Gulf of Thailand, the people said.

U.S. aviation investigators said they were analyzing the satellite transmissions to determine whether they can glean information about the plane's ultimate location or status. The transmissions were sent via onboard technology designed to send routine maintenance and system-monitoring data back to the ground via satellite links, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Among the possible scenarios investigators said they are now considering is whether the jet may have landed at any point during the five-hour period under scrutiny, or whether it ultimately crashed.

The people said aviation investigators are exploring the possibility that someone on the plane may have intentionally disabled two other automated communication systems in an attempt to avoid detection. One system is the transponders, which transmit to ground radar stations information on the plane's identity, location and altitude, and another system that collects and transmits data about several of the plane's key systems.

The widebody jet was scheduled to fly overnight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur in the predawn hours of March 8. Its transponders last communicated with Malaysian civilian radar about an hour after takeoff.

After the plane dropped off civilian radar screens, two people said, the satellite link operated in a kind of standby mode for several hours and sought to establish contact with a satellite or satellites. These transmissions didn't include data about any of the plane's critical systems, they said, but the periodic contacts indicate to investigators that the plane was still intact and believed to be flying at least a significant portion of that time. All of the people said the transmissions included detailed information about the plane's location, speed and bearing.

The transmissions, one person said, were comparable to the plane "saying I'm here, I'm ready to send data."

The uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it apparently continued flying so long without working transponders and other communication links, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for reasons that remain unclear to U.S. authorities.

At one briefing, according to one of the people, officials were told that investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose."

As authorities scramble to analyze and understand all of the transmissions from the missing 777, the situation continues to change rapidly. Some people briefed on the issue initially described the transmissions as information that had been relayed from onboard monitoring systems embedded in the two Rolls-Royce PLC Trent 800 engines, not the idling satellite communications system.

 

[Joe]

I think we should be looking at Diego Garcia and what the US military has installed there, and why.

 

[loreta]

I think we should be looking at Diego Garcia and what the US military has installed there, and why.

This is incredible, what is this isle. The Americans control the planet entirely from Diego Garcia. I am flabbergasted after reading about it from here:

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia

At the end of this long description of this isle, we can see how USA has an enormous infrastructure to control the world. If an atomic war start somewhere it will be from Diego Garcia. This place smells very, very bad.

 

[stellar]

Most recently an IBM executive , a Mr Woods, has been identified to have been on board flight 379.

Then on March 12 @ 1.20am the 'massive' blackout over Darwin for some 24 hours and claims that all public sectors have been closed down. There were no reports of unusual weather based anomalies even with the cyclone looming in the gulf.

IF the plane had been landed elsewhere while everyone was on a wild goose chase, a blackout of this scale may be conducive to bringing it over to the Northern Territory where the is heck of a base at Pine Gap.....Just thinking out loud.

 

[Andrian]

I think we should be looking at Diego Garcia and what the US military has installed there, and why.

From Wikipedia's article about the Diego Garcia Island what caught my attention was that on this base there is installed the GEODSS Telescope :

Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance
GEODSS at Diego Garcia
Midcourse Space Experiment

Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance, or GEODSS, is an optical system that uses telescopes, low-light level TV cameras, and computers. It replaced an older system of six 20 inch (half meter) Baker-Nunn cameras using photographic film.

There are three operational GEODSS sites that report to the 21st Operations Group:

Socorro, New Mexico 33.8172°N 106.6599°W
Maui, Hawaii20.7088°N 156.2578°W
Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory7.41173°S 72.45222°E.

A site at Choe Jong San, South Korea was closed in 1993 due to nearby smog from the town, weather and cost concerns. Originally, the fifth GEODSS was planned to be operated from a site in Portugal, but this was never built.

A mobile telescope that contributes to the GEODSS system is located at Morón Air Base, Spain 37.170°N 5.609°W

GEODSS tracks objects in deep space, or from about 3,000 mi (4,800 km) out to beyond geosynchronous altitudes. GEODSS requires nighttime and clear weather tracking because of the inherent limitations of an optical system. Each site has three telescopes. The telescopes have a 40-inch (1.02 m) aperture and a two-degree field of view. The telescopes are able to "see" objects 10,000 times dimmer than the human eye can detect. This sensitivity, and sky background during daytime that masks satellites reflected light, dictates that the system operate at night. As with any ground-based optical system, cloud cover and local weather conditions directly influence its effectiveness. GEODSS system can track objects as small as a basketball more than 20,000 miles (30,000 km) in space or a chair at 35,000 miles (56,000 km), and is a vital part of USSTRATCOM’s Space Surveillance Network. Distant Molniya orbiting satellites are often detected in elliptical orbits that surpass the Moon and back (245,000 miles out). Each GEODSS site tracks approximately 3,000 objects per night out of 9,900 object that are regularly tracked and accounted for. Objects crossing the International Space Station (ISS) orbit within 20 miles (32 km) will cause the ISS to adjust their orbit to avoid collision. The oldest object tracked is Object #4 (Vanguard 1) launched in 1958.

Maybe its unimportant,if so sorry for the noise.

 

[RedFox]

I think we should be looking at Diego Garcia and what the US military has installed there, and why.

An interesting starting point _http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/9/forcibly_exiled_for_nearly_40_years

We turn now to another island that is a key military outpost for the United States. Located in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia has often been used for strikes on Iraq and Afghanistan and played a critical role in the US extraordinary rendition program. Unlike Guam, Diego Garcia has no inhabitants resisting the US military. All of the island’s residents were forcibly removed in the early 1970s. For the last four decades, former residents of Diego Garcia and their descendants have been fighting for the right to return. We speak with Olivier Bancoult, a leader of the exiled people of Diego Garcia and president of the Chagos Refugees Group; and David Vine, author of the book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia. [includes rush transcript]

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to another island that is a key military outpost for the United States. Located in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia has been used for — often used for strikes on Iraq and Afghanistan. The island also played a critical role in the US extraordinary rendition program.
The military analyst John Pike recently described Diego Garcia as the most important facility the US has. According to Pike, the military’s goal is to be able to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.
Unlike Guam, Diego Garcia has no inhabitants resisting the US military. All of the island’s residents were forcibly removed in the early 1970s by the British as part of an agreement with the United States. Most of the former residents of Diego Garcia were shipped to Mauritius, located over a thousand miles away. For the last four decades, former residents of Diego Garcia and their descendants have been fighting for the right to return.
We’re joined now by Olivier Bancoult. He is a leader of the exiled people of Diego Garcia and president of the Chagos Refugees Group. He was expelled from his native Diego Garcia when he was four years old.
We’re also joined by David Vine, author of the book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia.
Olivier Bancoult, I want to start with you. Welcome to Democracy Now!
OLIVIER BANCOULT: Thank you for inviting me to Democracy Now!
JUAN GONZALEZ: Could you talk to us first about the experience of the removal, what you and your family remember of the removal by the British and how it came about?
OLIVIER BANCOULT: Yeah. The way that we have been removed, it was forcibly removed by the British government in order to make place for the US military base in Diego Garcia. We all have to move, first on Diego Garcia and then followed by the outer island, Peros Banhos and Salomon. So that means that we have been removed twice. And we have been dumped in the slum of Port Louis without any consideration and without any planning.
And the whole what we used to do in Chagos was now the same in Mauritius. Life become more and more difficult for us. This is why we have been trying to see what we can do, and it give me this opportunity to be here in the United States to just try to have an open dialogue with the new administration of Barack — President Barack Obama administration, to see. And it’s very important that on this day I’ve been — learned that President Barack Obama had been awarded Nobel Peace Prize. And I think that he will use it in order to solve the problem, to put an end to all the — solve the problems faced by Chagossian community since the uproot, their removal from their birthplace.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And when the British removed your people from the island, how many people were removed? Did they offer any kind of compensation to the families for the properties they lost? And what kind of compensation did they receive?
OLIVIER BANCOULT: When we were removed, we were, in all, 2,500. But there was no compensation. This had been followed by all the legal battle, not only by hunger strike, by demonstration, by Chagossian women. And for some years, we have received very little compensation, which was not enough in order to pay all the debt we had done during our stay in Mauritius, because in Chagos, everyone has his own house, whereas in Mauritius, we have to pay rent, and we don’t have money, we don’t have a job. And this is why we consider that compensation was not enough. And people are still living in poverty, and we have been dumped the slum of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius.
JUAN GONZALEZ: David Vine, you have chronicled this incredible story that is little known throughout the rest of the world. How did the British end up depopulating the island on behalf of the United States?
DAVID VINE: It was — and this is one of the main points of my book Island of Shame — it was, from the beginning, a US plan. The US identified Diego Garcia as the site for a military base beginning in the late 1950s and approached the British to gain access to the islands and to remove the Chagossians. And with the help of a $14 million secret payment that we made to the British government, we secured their agreement to give us access to the island and then to forcibly remove all the Chagossians, which was ultimately done, again, on our orders.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the island remains under whose sovereignty right now?
DAVID VINE: It remains a British colony, actually the last created British colony. But the base is firmly a US base. It’s a massive Air Force and Navy base.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, you went all around the world trying to dig up the documents on this. Tell us how you got involved in investigating this scandal.
DAVID VINE: I got involved about eight years ago, when some of the lawyers representing the Chagossians in lawsuits in the United States and Britain contacted me to serve as an expert witness in their suits, to go and live with the Chagossians and to document the effects of the expulsion on their lives. But very quickly, I realized there was a larger story that I wanted to understand and tell, and that was how US government came to order the expulsion of the Chagossians and orchestrate it and why we have a military base in the Indian Ocean in the first place.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And why is Diego Garcia so important?
DAVID VINE: Largely because of its proximity to a large swath of the globe, from south — from southern Africa through, and especially, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, all the way to South and Southeast Asia. But it’s been the control that the United States has been able to exert over the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and its oil and natural gas supplies, in particular, that have made Diego Garcia so strategically important.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, you make the point in your research that the leaders of Congress were not always favorable to this idea of establishing this base on Diego Garcia and that, in effect, folks in the Pentagon attempted to circumvent the political leadership in terms of being able to reach the point that they have now of this major military base.
DAVID VINE: That’s right. Actually, members of Congress were not told at all about the base until the end of the 1960s, when the Navy went to Congress asking for an appropriation for the construction of what they called an “austere communications facility,” although, from the beginning, they had plans for a much larger base. But members of Congress were simply not informed about the expulsion of the Chagossians and were lied to, in fact.
At the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, when they asked about local inhabitants, they were simply told that the island was home to a few transient laborers. This was part of a public relations plan that the British helped craft, where they would, quote, “maintain the fiction,” unquote — and those were the words they used — “maintain the fiction” that the islands were inhabited by transient laborers, rather than an indigenous people that the Chagossians are, who had been living there for more than five generations, since the time of the American Revolution.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Olivier Bancoult, your reaction to being labeled by the Pentagon "transient laborers"? What was life like on Diego Garcia before the military came?
OLIVIER BANCOULT: Life was very good. Everyone was enjoying life in harmony and peace, because we have our culture, we have our tradition. We all have a house. We all have a job. We used to work in a coconut plantation, where just after working our work, we used to go to the sea to fish. And there is an idea of share between each other. We all live as one family. And we have our culture, like our special meal, like our music, which had been taken [inaudible], because everyone wants to promote culture, but what about our culture? They just want to destroy it. This is why it’s so important for us to have our dignity and our fundamental rights back as all human beings to be able to live in our birthplace.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the rest of the population of the island was scattered, not just to Mauritius. What other parts of the world did they end up in?
OLIVIER BANCOULT: Yeah, most of the Chagossians was — they have been in Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. But we have others of our brothers and sisters in Seychelles, and where we still are fighting —-the most important for them is how life was in Chagos, is very different to Mauritius and to other place, because we prefer to be in our birthplace, as all human beings, because it’s something very important to all human beings.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And David Vine, you traced some of this diaspora to other parts of the world, as well, even to England directly?
DAVID VINE: That’s right. In the past six years or so, the Chagossians, as a result of the struggle that Olivier described, that they’ve been waging for more than four decades now, the Chagossians won the right to full British citizenship, which includes the right of a vote in Britain. So we’ve seen in the past several years about a thousand or more Chagossians moving to Britain, where they’ve -— some have been able to improve their lives a bit. Many are actually working in low-wage jobs at places like Gatwick Airport. But the diaspora has spread, while they continue their struggle to return to their homeland and receive proper compensation for what they’ve suffered in exile.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And you mentioned that this is an island that journalists — no journalist has ever visited?
DAVID VINE: Since the very early 1980s, essentially no journalist has been allowed to go. I was denied and turned down on multiple occasions when I asked both the US and British governments for permission to go to the islands to carry out my research. And journalists have effectively been barred there for more than two decades.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I’d like to thank you both for being with us, David Vine, author of the book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia, and Olivier Bancoult, a leader of the exiled people of Diego Garcia and president of the Chagos Refugees Group.
DAVID VINE: Thank you so much.
OLIVIER BANCOULT: Thank you so much.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Thank you for being with us

 

[Arwenn]

I think we should be looking at Diego Garcia and what the US military has installed there, and why.

Well it looks like (as usual) the psychopaths took what they wanted and tossed the native inhabitants of these islands aside. From Wikipedia:

Diego Garcia is a tropical, footprint-shaped coral atoll located south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean. It is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Diego Garcia lies in the Chagos Archipelago at the southernmost tip of the Chagos-Laccadive Ridge — a vast submarine range in the Indian Ocean, topped by a long chain of coral reefs, atolls, and islands comprising Lakshadweep, Maldives, and the Chagos Archipelago.

The United States Navy operates Naval Support Facility (NSF) Diego Garcia, a large naval ship and submarine support base, military air base, communications and space-tracking facility, and an anchorage for pre-positioned military supplies for regional operations aboard Military Sealift Command ships in the lagoon.[4]
Mauritius sought to regain sovereignty, lost to the UK in 1965, over the Chagos Archipelago. Between 1968 and 1973, the Chagossians, then numbering about 2,000 people, were expelled by the British government to Mauritius and Seychelles to allow the United States to establish a military base on the island. Today, the exiled Chagossians are still trying to return, claiming that the forced expulsion and dispossession was illegal

United States military activities
During the Cold War era, the United States was keen to establish a military base in the Indian Ocean to counter Soviet influence in the region and protect the sea-lanes for oil transportation from the Middle East. The United States saw the island as a strategically important one.The value has been proven many times, with the island providing a "fixed aircraft carrier" for the United States during the Iranian revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The United States military facilities on Diego Garcia have been known informally as Camp Justice and, after renaming in July 2006, as Camp Thunder Cove. Formally, the base is known as Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia (the U.S. activity) or Permanent Joint Operating Base (PJOB) Diego Garcia (the UK's term).

Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia-provides Base Operating Services to tenant commands located on the island. The command's mission is "To provide logistic support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf AORs in support of national policy objectives."

United States pre-positioned vessels- The atoll shelters the ships of the United States Marine Pre-positioning Squadron Two. These ships carry equipment and supplies to support a major armed force with tanks, armoured personnel carriers, munitions, fuel, spare parts and even a mobile field hospital. This equipment was used during the Persian Gulf War, when the squadron transported equipment to Saudi Arabia.

Air Force satellite control network station-The United States Air Force operates a remote tracking station on Diego Garcia. Its call sign is REEF.

GEODSS Station-The United States Air Force Operates a station of the Ground-based Electro-optical Deep Space Surveillance system on the southern end of the atoll

HF global station- The United States Air Force operates a High Frequency Global Communications System transceiver site located on the south end of the atoll near the GEODSS station. The transceiver is operated remotely from Joint Base Andrews and locally maintained by NCTS FE personnel.

Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station Far East Detachment Diego Garcia-This detachment provides base telephone communications, provides base network services (Local Network Services Center), pier connectivity services, an AN/GSC-39C SHF satellite terminal, operates the Hydroacoustic Data Acquisition System, and performs on-site maintenance for the remotely operated Air Force HF-GCS terminal