Secret CIA Prisons in Your Backyard

[tpsbmam]

Secret CIA Prisons in Your Backyard

http://www.alternet.org/story/41923/

<snips>

How extensive is it? Trevor Paglen, an expert in clandestine military installations, and A.C. Thompson, an award-winning journalist for S.F. Weekly, spent months tracking the CIA flights and the businesses behind them. What they found was a startlingly broad network of planes (including the Gulfstream jet belonging to Boston Red Sox co-owner Phillip Morse), shell companies, and secret prisons around the world. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation of their new book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights is the collusion of everyday Americans in this massive CIA program. From family lawyers who bolster the shell companies, to an entire town in Smithfield, N.C., that hosts CIA planes and pilots, Torture Taxi is the story of the broad reach of extraordinary rendition, and, as Hannah Arendt coined the phrase, the banality of evil.

Roychoudhuri: What did you find when you examined some of these documents?

Thompson: ......

That's the same with all these companies. They don't have real headquarters, staff or anything besides these paper documents they filed to incorporate and a handful of lawyers who helped set these companies up and serve as the registered agents for them. These are the people who receive summons and subpoenas for the companies.

Roychoudhuri: Did you get a sense of the scope of the rendition program through your travels in Afghanistan?

Thompson: When Trevor and I went to Afghanistan we realized that this wasn't about a handful of CIA secret prisons. The U.S. military has erected some 20 detention centers throughout Afghanistan --which all operate in near total secrecy. These are facilities that the U.N., the Afghan government, journalists, and human rights groups can't get into. Extraordinary rendition is one facet of a much broader story of secrecy and imprisonment that spans the globe.

In Kabul and Gardez, we interviewed many people--in human rights organizations, NGOs, local journalists, and former detainees.....It's more like the U.S. is treating this whole country as if it were a giant black site.


Paglen: This rendition and torture is one flavor of a larger thing going on: the U.S. taking people all over the place, imprisoning and torturing them without charge.

Thompson: ......it was clear that the Americans had grabbed hundreds and hundreds of people. They're being held without charges, in some 20 different facilities.

Roychoudhuri: Who are these people?

Paglen: .....an international cast of characters at this DOD prison. So what the hell are they doing there? These are not high-profile renditions....So who are these guys? How did they get there? Is this part of the rendition program, or has the practice of transferring prisoners to these different places around the world become a standard practice?

Roychoudhuri: You quote 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick in the book: "In criminal justice, you either prosecute suspects or let them go. But if you've treated them in ways that won't allow you to prosecute them, you're in this no man's land. What do you do with those people?" Based on the fact that it's so difficult to bring these people back out of this extralegal system, do you have any sense of where the rendition program is going?

Paglen: This is the crucial question that we are facing right now. Bush transferred a handful of guys to Guantanamo and acknowledged they were kept in these secret prisons. Congress has to come up with a framework to prosecute these guys. It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters. But the guys that Bush transferred to Guantanamo Bay are guys that everybody agrees are bad guys. The sticking point is that they have tortured them for years and the evidence against them is totally tainted by rendition and torture. These are guys that people definitely want to see put on trial. By moving them to Guantanamo Bay, Bush is basically challenging Congress and saying, "If you want to put Khaled Sheikh Mohammed on trial, you're going to have to retroactively authorize torture, rendition, and the black site program."

If Congress does authorize the president's version of the bill, they're not only retroactively authorizing torture, they're creating a legal framework for the future. That would create a system where disappearing and torturing people would become a part of the law.

[magellan]

1. Sweet Jesus

If Congress does authorize the president's version of the bill, they're not only retroactively authorizing torture, they're creating a legal framework for the future. That would create a system where disappearing and torturing people would become a part of the law.

Well, I guess all I'm allowed to say is: Chavez, you thug! Quit calling our president the devil!!

:mad: :mad:

[DemoTex]

2. "Torture Taxi" HDQS: Smithfield, NC. Why?

Why Smithfield? A glance at a road atlas informs me that Smithfield is the corner of a triangle that is anchored by Ft. Bragg (and Pope, AFB) to the south and Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base to the east (with Seymour-Johnson AFB on the triangle's side between Smithfield and Lejeune).

Eastern North Carolina is sparsely populated, boasts beaucoup military bases, and is extremely conservative: not a bad location for clandestine para-military operations. Not surprising, Blackwater, USA, the infamous mercenary outfit (with sinister ops in Iraq and New Orleans) is headquartered in northeastern North Carolina (Moyock, near the big Navy complexes of Norfolk, Va.), not far from Smithfield, NC.

Just a coinky-dinky? Maybe.