Stopping the Torture Business in Our Hometowns

[struggle4progress]

Stop Torture Now
by Ron Jacobs
www.dissidentvoice.org
February 1, 2007

... North Carolina Stop Torture Now (NC STN) began work in the fall of 2005. That was when activists from St. Louis brought the issue of extraordinary rendition to our attention. With them, we carried out an action of non-violent civil disobedience -- trespassing -- at the headquarters of Aero Contractors in Smithfield, NC.

Without Aero Contractors and similar CIA front companies, rendition literally wouldn't "get off the ground." Aero uses publicly funded airport facilities in North Carolina as a launching pad to help the CIA kidnap and torture people in various parts of the world. Once we realized this, we couldn't ignore it. NC STN is a grassroots coalition of educators, peace and human rights activists, people of faith, students, and working people. We're not particularly affiliated with any church or other group. Active in our ranks are people from the ACLU, Amnesty International, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the Catholic Worker movement, CodePink, the Green Party, the North Carolina Council of Churches, Peace Action, Quaker House, Unitarian Universalist congregations, and various other faith groups.

We started in the Triangle area, and have built connections to people in eastern and western North Carolina. Community activists working on the anti-Aero campaign include members of Coastal Carolina Peace (Carteret County), the Piedmont Centre for Peace and Justice (Winston-Salem), and Wilmington Peace Meetup. Anti-torture students are active at Eastern Carolina University and UNC-Asheville. We're also communicating with anti-torture activists in Massachusetts, the Bay Area, Oregon, and Washington, DC ...

A typical rendition begins with a Gulfstream executive jet taking off from the Johnston County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina. It is serviced and piloted by a crew from Aero Contractors, which has a long history with the CIA. The plane might stop near Washington, D.C., to take on a CIA "snatch" team. The next stop would be in Europe to refuel, and then on to a city in Europe or the Middle East, where the CIA team kidnaps the suspect directly, or accepts custody of him from local police agents. Dressed and masked in black, the CIA team beats, strips, searches, and binds the prisoner, drugs him with an anal suppository, and then flies him with Aero Contractors' help to a foreign jail ...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb07/Jacobs01.htm