US officials regarded the Chagossians’ expulsion as colonial-era afterthought.

Evidence

Former Pentagon official Gary Sick testified to Congress about the Chagossians’ expulsion in 1975, on the one day Congress has ever examined the issue. “The fact is,” Sick told me years later, “nobody cared very much about these populations.” … “It was more of a nineteenth-century decision—thought process—than a twentiethor twenty-first-century thought process,” Sick said. “I think that was the bind they got caught in. That this was sort of colonial thinking after the fact, about what you could do.” And U.S. officials, Sick added, “were pleased to let the British do their dirty work for them.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 209

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the book’s central thesis about US complicity in the Chagossian expulsion.