The base site was chosen partly because its population was deemed negligible

Evidence

A fundamental part of Stuart Barber’s Strategic Island Concept was the idea of avoiding antibase protests. The Navy, Barber thought, needed to ensure it would have bases without “political complications” like those increasingly arising in the decolonizing world. Any targeted island would have to be “free of impingement on any significant indigenous population or economic interest,” Barber wrote. He was pleased to note that Diego Garcia’s population was “measured only in the hundreds.” The CIA’s assessment of the population size was even more telling: a report described it as “NEGL”—negligible. A Navy memo later concurred: “The selection of these islands was based on unquestioned UK sovereignty and a negligible native population.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 177

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘NEGL population’ framing echoes a pattern in which administrative language renders Native people invisible before displacement — like the doctrine of terra nullius applied to inhabited lands.
• SEED: An essay angle: how dehumanizing bureaucratic shorthand (‘NEGL,’ ‘negligible’) enables quiet expulsions — the moral weight of a census label in dispossession.
• SHARE: The CIA literally cataloguing a populated island’s residents as ‘NEGL’ is worth sending to someone interested in settler-colonial documentary practice.