US officials treated Chagossian welfare as a trivial detail never discussed.

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

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Officials omitted the human costs of displacement from consideration (similarity 0.85)
• US officials regarded the Chagossians’ expulsion as colonial-era afterthought. (similarity 0.80)
• Britain cut food supplies to drive Chagossians out while denying their rootedness. (similarity 0.79)
• A key U.S. official called the Chagossian expulsion inexcusably inhuman. (similarity 0.78)
• U.S. and British forces deported Chagossians under conditions compared to slave ships. (similarity 0.78)
• Chagossian compensation was small, delayed, and largely consumed by debt (similarity 0.78)