Officials omitted the human costs of displacement from consideration

Evidence

A former State Department official, James Noyes, who was involved in the creation of the base, told me that he and others considered the Chagossians a small “nitty gritty” detail that they thought the British were handling. “The ethical question of the workers and so on,” Noyes told me, “simply wasn’t in the spectrum. It wasn’t discussed. No one realized, I don’t think … the human aspects of it. Nobody was there or had been there, or was close enough to it, so. It was like questioning apple pie or something.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the psychological distance/indifference theme connecting to the sacrifice article’s moral calculus of weighing populations.