In the mid 90's I got to spend a quiet and frankly wonderful 60 days on Diego Garcia while I was enlisted in the USAF. It is a wonderful island, you can bike around the whole thing in a couple hours, the rec facilities were great, beer was incredibly cheap, and the Internet (on such a remote island, in 1995!) was the best/fastest I had seen at that point.

That all said, the forced expulsion thing (which I just caught up on) is news to me now. I guess bullies will always exist. It reminds me of forcibly relocating people in the US via eminent domain to build a highway. It's possible that an ethical argument can be made that if the security of the USA actually did depend on total control of that island, the cost in dollars and emotion of "strongly encouraging" people to move elsewhere might be justifiable (and I do believe they were compensated... the gassing of pets thing is shocking, though).