Diego Garcia, an island between Africa and Asia, was once a paradise for its 2000 inhabitants. But all that changed in the 1960s when the United States took over the island for use as a military base and forced the inhabitants into exile. Commentator John Pilger writes in a recent article that often it is one crime that exposes how a whole system works. “To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia,” he writes.