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<h1><b>Confronting Rendition to Torture in North
Carolina</b></h1><font size=3>By
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/clarehanrahan">Clare
Hanrahan</a><br><br>
Source: WarIsACrime.org<br>
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/confronting-rendition-to-torture-in-north-carolina-by-clare-hanrahan" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/confronting-rendition-to-torture-in-north-carolina-by-clare-hanrahan<br>
</a>Friday, July 09, 2010<br><br>
<br>
Despite what our leaders may profess, U.S. directed torture continues and
efforts to obtain redress for victims and accountability from
perpetrators are met with systematic obstruction. We know we cannot rely
on government, at any level, to take the initiative for
accountability.<br><br>
But we must not be bystanders.<br><br>
Six years have passed since the release of the gruesome photos of torture
at Abu Ghraib, and it is well past the deadline President Obama set for
closing the prison camps at Guantanamo. Yet this Administration has
steadfastly refused to seek accountability for U.S.-sponsored torturethe
murderous extent of which is still being revealedand invokes the “state
secrets” privilege to obstruct prosecution when torture victims, some
released without charge, seek legal redress.<br><br>
These issues are never easy to confront. They require us to break through
our denial, take in the horror, and hold it in awareness while we
organize for action.<br><br>
In a 2006 report, The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
(PACE) accused the United States of operating a “clandestine ‘spiderweb’
of disappearances, secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers,
often encompassing countries notorious for their use of torture. Hundreds
of persons have become entrapped in this websome merely suspected of
sympathizing with a presumed terrorist organization.”<br><br>
In North Carolina, a tenacious grassroots coalition of peace and human
rights activists, religious groups, and courageous locals has organized
as NC Stop Torture Now (NC-STN). According to the group, “Officials of
the Bush Administration used North Carolina as a key part of their secret
off-shore torture program.” The “torture taxi” planes were based in
Johnston and Lenoir counties. Their pilots and crews work for Aero
Contractors, a CIA linked company headquartered at the Johnston County
airport in Smithfield, a town of less than 12,000 persons situated in the
Coastal Plain of North Carolina about 30 miles east of Raleigh.<br><br>
NC Stop Torture Now has been campaigning since 2005 at local, state, and
federal levels for an end to the practice of extraordinary rendition to
torture and for an investigation of Aero Contractors. They act boldly and
deftly to educate the public and state officials. They seek
acknowledgment and accountability for the crimes, apology and restitution
for torture survivors, and assurance that state and national resources
will never again be used to secretly disappear people and torture them,
whether they are guilty of crimes or not.<br><br>
The U.N. Convention against Torture, ratified by the U.S.in 1994,
requires in Article III: “No state shall expel, return or extradite a
person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing
that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Failure to
prosecute violations is considered a breach of international law. North
Carolina law requires anyone in charge of a state agency, such as the
Global TransPark where Aero maintained a hangar in Kinston, to report
possible criminal violations to the State Bureau of
Investigation.<br><br>
NC-STN was pivotal in organizing a public conference, “Weaving a Net of
Accountability: Taking on Extraordinary Rendition at the State and
Regional Level,” held April 8-9 at Duke University. Speakers came from
Ireland, London, New York, Washington, Boston, and from throughout North
Carolina.<br><br>
“It is clear that our public taxpayer-funded airports are systematically
being used by the CIA for purposes that may in fact still include
extraordinary rendition,” said Christina Cowger, a conference organizer
and facilitator with NC-STN. Aero Contractors was founded in 1979 in the
wake of the dismantling of Air America, the CIA airline that participated
heavily in the Indo-China wars, she said.<br><br>
“It was actually the St. Louis folks who woke us up to the fact that we
had this CIA operation in our backyard,” Cowger acknowledged. A
delegation from St. Louis including longtime human rights activist and
war-tax resister Bill Ramsey and his friend, Andrew Wimmer, traveled to
North Carolina in November 2005.<br><br>
The group joined with local members of NC-STN and served a peoples’
indictment to Aero Contractors, charging them with multiple counts of
violation of U.S. and international laws and treaties banning torture by
providing pilots and planes for the CIA’s program of extraordinary
rendition. The citizen action resulted in 14 arrestsnot of the officials
who are complicit in rendition to torture, but of the activists who came
to seek accountability.<br><br>
Wimmer was working then with the St. Louis-based Center for Theology and
Social Analysis. His research on extraordinary rendition led to Global
TransPark, a public-private consortium built by the state of North
Carolina with economic development funds.<br><br>
According to Cowger, UK journalist Stephen Grey used flight logs from the
FAA and Eurocontrol (the FAA’s counterpart in Europe) to piece together
the itineraries of the two main rendition planes, the Kinston-based N313P
and the smaller Gulfstream, N379P, which was based at the Johnston County
airport. Tail numbers have since been changed. A Montana-registered
Gulfstream IV aircraft, with tail number N478GS, operated by Centurian
Aviation, was based at the Fayetteville Airport, and is suspected of
facilitating the extraordinary rendition program, according to Cowger, as
an arm of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), based at Fort
Bragg.<br><br>
“The point is really a simple one,” said Robin Kirk, director of the
Human Rights Center at Duke University, in introducing Gavin Simpson,
lead investigator with the Council of Europe and conference presenter.
“We are trying to do something about human rights abuse, extraordinary
rendition, and the torture that came along with it that has its feet in
our state…to get around the impunity that seems to be reigning right now
with regard to human rights issues.”<br><br>
The Council of Europe serves its 46 member states as “the guardian for
human rights, democracy, and respect for the rule of law in Europe,”
using as its reference point the European Convention on Human
Rights.<br><br>
Aero Contractors was the aviation “hub” of the CIA’s rendition program,
which “flew dozens of people to horrific jails around the globe, using
‘civilian’ aircraft,” according to NC Stop Torture Now. The group has
compiled a partial list of twenty-four detainees secretly transported by
Aero Contractors for torture by or for the CIA, citing as a primary
source the book Ghost Plane by Stephen Grey.<br><br>
The pickup methodology for the CIA’s torture rendition flights was
“alarmingly systematized,” said Simpson, who has followed the gruesome
trail of so-called “extraordinary rendition” throughout Europe. “It
involved stripping the suspect naked, often roughly beating him around
the midriff and the ribs in the process. Men clad in ninja suits, black
balaclavas, tight fitting black coatsunidentifiable from one another and
without speaking a single wordwould then put this person through a
process of shackling, handcuffing….” Simpson said that the captors would
administer sedatives, often via the rectum, and blindfold, earmuff,
goggle, and hood the captives. They would place the prisoners in adult
diapers, and then put them in jumpsuits or other rudimentary clothing.
Finally they were “bundled onto a rendition aircraft, shackled to the
ground or a gurney, sometimes given further sedatives so that they
wouldn’t experience the flight, and then flown to a fate and a
destination unknown.”<br><br>
“Aero Contractors personnel on the aircraft were the ones who actually
operated the rendition circuits. Without their personal participation,
none of this would have been possible. They were the pilots in command.
They were the support crew. They were the persons who held the controls
of the aircraft and navigated them to landings at the black sites air
[fields] with detainees bound and shackled in the back. Aero personnel
were part of the systematic cover-up. For example, the pilots in command
knowingly deviated from registered flight plans, willfully therefore
violating the regulations of international aviation law and assuring that
their operations could not be traced contemporaneously and have been
mighty hard to track retrospectively,” Simpson said.<br><br>
Aero Contractors employed about 80 persons toward the start of the Bush
war on terror. Now it’s up to about 130 employees. “We are under no
illusion that people like these are the authors of the policy. They are
the foot soldiers,” Cowger asserted. “These people live and work in
Johnston County in comfortable middle class houses.”<br><br>
In May 2010, the Attorney General of Spain requested that a Spanish judge
issue arrest warrants for 13 U.S. citizens who helped kidnap and
disappear German citizen Khaled el-Masri as part of the Bush
Administration’s program of extraordinary rendition. At least three of
the U.S. citizens are pilots employed by Aero Contractors.<br><br>
Allyson Caison, a Johnston County-based real estate broker, has been
involved in NC-STN since its inception. “When in 2005 we got a notice
that the folks from St. Louis were coming and were going to tell us what
the CIA was doing,” the former PTA president told the assembly, “I went
to the meeting to see what was going on.” Caison says she was shocked to
find that the people involved with Aero Contractors were “the pillars of
our community...very well-enmeshed in society. So in speaking out against
them, we are not speaking out against some abstract person; we’re
speaking out against our neighbors.”<br><br>
Confronting these issues is not easy. It takes courage. It takes
persistence. It takes fortitude.<br><br>
But we must not be bystanders.<br><br>
Chuck Fager, director of Quaker House, in Fayetteville, NC, is active
with NC-STN in their persistent lobbying efforts before the Johnston
County Board of Commissioners.“They are all Republicans and the ones up
for re-election are running unopposed,” he said at the Duke conference.
“After 14 months or so, we are establishing a relationship with these
commissioners…month after month after month we go back. Building these
types of connections is very important.”<br><br>
Fager and I later talked about how difficult it is to face up to the
issue of U.S. directed torture. “All the dots connected in my back yard,”
he said. “It’s like waking up one morning and realizing you live next to
SS headquarters.”<br><br>
Recalling the June 2006 Quaker conference on torture held in Greensboro,
NC, he admitted that listening was “very hard. It made me shake. I
couldn’t sleep very well. I moved to a different level…my ability to keep
it [torture] far away has been eroded. The levels of denial are really
deep.”<br><br>
Robin Kirk, in her opening remarks at the conference said, “We have to do
this work where we live. We have to do this…to show our neighbors and
colleagues and school teachers and grocery clerks and businessmen and
soldiers, why human rights matter.” Kirk spent years working in Peru and
Colombia documenting human rights abuses, and authored several reports
for Human Rights Watch.<br><br>
In his keynote address, Scott Horton, a contributing editor with Harper’s
Magazine, detailed some of the findings of his investigation of the
sudden and violent deaths of three prisoners at Camp Deltathe
“extra-constitutional” prison camp at Guantanamo Naval Base. In a March
2010 Harper’s Magazine report, Horton wrote of evidence “that suggests
the current administration failed to investigate seriouslyand may even
have continueda cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at
Guantanamo in 2006.”<br><br>
“When the last prisoner is departed from that area of the American
enclave on the island of Cuba, the book on Guantanamo is going to be far
from closed,” Horton told the Duke assembly that drew about 120 people
throughout the weekend. “Most of the legacy of Guantanamo remains in
place, untouched, and there is as yet no real basis to assume there will
be any kind of accountability,” he said. “Ideas linked to Guantanamo are
being woven into the fabric of our national security state. These
transformations are going on in the policy background in Washington with
surprisingly little attention.”<br><br>
And the horrid revelations continue.<br><br>
Stephen Soldz, a co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology,
which has made international news with its campaign to challenge the
participation of leaders in the American Psychological Association in
interrogation and torture, provided the Duke conference with insight into
the psychology of denial and accountability. Soldz is president-elect of
Psychologists for Social Responsibility and coauthor of a report just
released by Physicians for Human Rights. The report, “Experiments in
Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the
‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program,” he contends, “confirms previous
suspicions and provides the first strong evidence that the CIA was indeed
engaged in illegal and unethical research on detainees in its
custody.”<br><br>
Steve Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program,
spoke of the ongoing legal challenges to the CIA’s extraordinary
rendition program. Noting the “significant legal impediments” to
obtaining judicial remedy, he said “It is all but certain that a
fully-fledged trial of a lawsuit brought by rendition survivors is many,
many years away.” With a nod to NC-STN activist Peggy Misch, Watt told
the Duke conference “NC Stop Torture Now is one of the most innovative
and creative grassroots groups working on torture in this
country.”<br><br>
Just prior to the Duke conference, Dr. Edward Horgan, a former Irish
Defence Forces officer and co-founder of Shannon Watch, had his 10-year
visa revoked by the U.S. State Department. After much pressure in the
Irish press and from U.S. allies, including Veterans for Peace, at the
last minute Dr. Horgan, who is also the International Secretary of the
Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance, was allowed travel to the
U.S.<br><br>
Ireland has been a neutral state since its inception, Horgan told the
assembly. Over one million U.S. troops have passed through Shannon since
2002. “Three plane loads a day, at least, each bringing about 200
troopsso 500 or 600 armed troops pass through Shannon airport every day
of the week, every day of the year, in gross violation of international
law on neutrality.”<br><br>
“Clearly torture is a serious crime. But it is connected with the two
wars [Afghanistan and Iraq],” Horgan continued. “By torturing somebody
you are removing some of their human rights, albeit very seriously and
very grossly. By killing somebody you are removing all of their human
rights. You are removing their very existence. Killing or causing the
deaths, directly or indirectly, of one million people, and killing
200,000 children, or causing their deaths, [in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan] is absolutely a gross crime against humanity, regardless of
who does it.”<br><br>
“Kidnap, rendition and torture of U.S. enemies is now being replaced with
extra-judicial killings and assassinations of U.S. enemies. Collateral
damage, including the killing of thousands of innocent foreign civilians,
is now acceptable to the U.S.,” Horgan said. “Obama has ordered a
dramatic increase in the U.S. drone attacks. …These extrajudicial
killings are being passed off as being part of the war on terror, a
necessary evil. But killing someone, extra-judicially or otherwise, but
unjustifiably, is even a more serious crime than torture.”<br><br>
“I can speak all you want about all the bad things that have happened to
myself and others,” Bisher al-Rawi told the assembly, speaking on live
video from his home in London. Al-Rawi was imprisoned, interrogated, and
tortured at two separate CIA facilities in Afghanistan, then transferred,
via Aero Contractors, to Guantanamo in 2003 and released without charges
in 2007. “Whether beatings, the pains, or the shivering cold, or people
screaming because nobody is giving them the medication, or people
screaming because they are being beaten up, whatever, I can go on with
all of that. But I think, on top of that, we should look to the future,
we should look at how we can actually do something positive to build
these lives, these lives that have been destroyed… I take this very close
to my heart and I have decided this is really my work in life for the
time being, until the time when we no longer have to speak about these
things. …I hope that will happen before too long.”<br><br>
But we must not be bystanders.<br><br>
##<br><br>
Clare Hanrahan is a contributing editor to War Crimes Times, an associate
member of Veterans For Peace Chapter 099, member of the National War Tax
Resistance Coordinating Committee, and an organizer with WRL
Asheville.<br><br>
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