Two soldiers on torture, and some other freaked-out experts

Do Unto Your Enemy... by PAUL RIECKHOFF

IN 2002, I attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning, Ga. At “the Schoolhouse,” every new Army infantry officer spent six months studying the basics of his craft, including the rules of war.

I remember a seasoned senior officer explaining the importance of the Geneva Conventions. He said, “When an enemy fighter knows he’ll be treated well by United States forces if he is captured, he is more likely to give up.”

A year later on the streets of Baghdad, I saw countless insurgents surrender when faced with the prospect of a hot meal, a pack of cigarettes and air-conditioning. America’s moral integrity was the single most important weapon my platoon had on the streets of Iraq. It saved innumerable lives, encouraged cooperation with our allies and deterred Iraqis from joining the growing insurgency.

But those days are over. America’s moral standing has eroded, thanks to its flawed rationale for war and scandals like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Haditha. The last thing we can afford now is to leave Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions open to reinterpretation, as President Bush proposed to do and can still do under the compromise bill that emerged last week.

Blurring the lines on the letter of Article 3 — it governs the treatment of prisoners of war, prohibiting “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” — will only make our troops’ tough fight even tougher. It will undermine the power of all the Geneva Conventions, immediately endanger American troops captured by the enemy and create a powerful recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

But the fight over Article 3 concerns not only Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq. It also affects future wars, because when we lower the bar for the treatment of our prisoners, other countries feel justified in doing the same. Four years ago in Liberia, in an attempt to preserve his corrupt authority, President Charles Taylor adopted the Bush administration’s phrase “unlawful combatants” to describe prisoners he wished to try outside of civilian courts. Today Mr. Taylor stands before The Hague accused of war crimes.

It is not hard to imagine that one of our Special Forces soldiers might one day be captured by Iranian forces while investigating a potential nuclear weapons program. What is to stop that soldier from being water-boarded, locked in a cold room for days without sleep as Iranian pop music blares all around him — and finally sentenced to die without a fair trial or the right to see the evidence against him?

If America continues to erode the meaning of the Geneva Conventions, we will cede the ground upon which to prosecute dictators and warlords. We will also become unable to protect our troops if they are perceived as being no more bound by the rule of law than dictators and warlords themselves.

The question facing America is not whether to continue fighting our enemies in Iraq and beyond but how to do it best. My soldiers and I learned the hard way that policy at the point of a gun cannot, by itself, create democracy. The success of America’s fight against terrorism depends more on the strength of its moral integrity than on troop numbers in Iraq or the flexibility of interrogation options.

Several Republican combat veterans, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Senators Lindsay Graham, John McCain and John Warner, have recognized that the president’s stance on Article 3 is a threat to our troops and to our interests. It would be insulting for the president to assume he knows more about war than they do.

But the compromise the president struck with the senators last week leaves the most significant questions unresolved. The veterans must hold their ground — and the White House must recognize that our troops need all the moral authority they can get.

(Paul Rieckhoff,the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, is the author of “Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier’s Fight for America From Baghdad to Washington.”)


Firing Potent Words, From a Tank -- by ARTHUR T. HADLEY

I’M pleased that President Bush has said he will enforce the letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions. I hope he stays true to his word.

My great respect for the conventions developed not from afar, but from the ground, in the Second World War, at the dirty-boot level, where the bullet meets the soldier.

As a young Army lieutenant, I had the job of making clear to the enemy, via loud speaker or leaflet-filled artillery shells, that the accords would be honored. Over and over, from Normandy to the Elbe, in tanks and in foxholes, my sergeants and I would say in German, “You will be well handled according to the Geneva Conventions.”

How did I find myself in this line of work? I started out with the Tank Destroyer Forces. But in one of Gen. George Marshall’s few mistakes, the destroyers were disbanded. Noting that I spoke some German, the Army then placed me as a second lieutenant in a German-speaking unit. Some of us made broadcasts; others interviewed captured German soldiers to discover ways to damage their morale.

This work was new to us and the Army, and we made up our rules as we went along. Through interviews with prisoners, we soon discovered that reminding Germans that they would be treated according to the Geneva Conventions was one of the most effective ways to persuade them to surrender.

Our broadcasts, then, took on the following structure: first, we’d outline what we knew about the German position; second, we’d describe the weight of artillery and air power that was about to fall on them; finally, we’d end with assurances that those troops who surrendered would be well treated under the Geneva Conventions.

Loudspeaker missions were not popular, as the Germans most often tried to shut them up with heavy fire. Initially, we’d place our speakers near the front lines and then run cables to the relative safety of the foxhole from which we’d broadcast.

Having trained as a “tanker,” I hoped to get loudspeakers off the ground and mounted on tanks, where they would be mobile and infinitely more effective during an attack. It was a wish that would not be fulfilled overnight: I was a young lieutenant in the position of having to persuade a tank general to give up a fighting vehicle for a loudspeaker.

Eventually, and somewhat to my surprise, I succeeded. After the Battle of the Bulge, I received the O.K. to mount a loudspeaker on a light tank of the Second Armored Division. At the same time an O.S.S. agent placed a loudspeaker on a Third Armored Division tank. He unfortunately was soon killed. This left my “talking tank,” as the Second Armored Division tank became known, as a pioneer.

At last, we could broadcast our message during an attack. This was an advantage because the enemy was more likely to surrender during an attack than after the battle had quieted down.

The jury-rigged tank also worked remarkably well. The loudspeaker itself was mounted on the forward slope of the turret and partly covered by a metal casing that resisted light machine-gun fire. The generator was set over the engine in the rear, totally covered. All the tank’s weapons could operate, though the wires attached to the speaker limited turret motion. Some of the ammunition racks inside the tank were removed and the amplifiers for the loudspeaker fastened to the steel insides.

We broadcasters lived in the turret, the tank driver was forward in the driver’s compartment and the electrician who maintained the loudspeaker and electronic equipment occupied the assistant driver’s seat.

Having trained as a tanker, I was familiar with tank combat. I could work the radios and fire the guns. I usually placed the tank as No. 3 in an attack column. There, it could broadcast immediately without interfering with the two point tanks as they checked right and left.

We were a success. In three weeks fighting beyond the Rhine in 1945, the Second Armored Division credited the talking tank for the surrender of 5,000 prisoners. The actions of the other tankers were also crucial. Their willingness to hold their fire gave surrenders a chance to happen. Germans had time to weigh the alternatives: an attack from our tanks versus imprisonment under the Geneva Conventions. In this way, American and German lives were saved.

The British had a similar strategy, though they did not use loudspeakers. They had a truck-drawn trailer with a radio broadcast studio and station inside. Led by Marius Goring (famous, later, as the hero of “The Red Shoes”), this unit would interview cooperative German prisoners and broadcast their reactions to their capture into Germany. In these broadcasts Goring would get prisoners to stress that while being a prisoner was no pleasure, they were treated fairly under the Geneva Conventions.

Yes, times have changed. Yes, we face a different enemy from the one we faced half a century ago. But I’ve seen firsthand the power of Geneva Conventions, both to compel surrenders and to broadcast, for the world, our determination to live up to our highest ideals.

(Arthur T. Hadley, a former assistant executive editor at The New York Herald Tribune, is the author of a forthcoming memoir, “Heads or Tales.”)


Torture Chic: Sign of Decadence – by Alan Bock

The great American essayist Albert J. Nock once devoted a long piece to the question of how one knows whether or not one is living in a Dark Age. From inside such an era, of course, the question is not so simple. Historians and propagandists name ages years or even centuries after the fact, but for most of those living at the time it probably didn’t seem like the Middle Ages or the Renaissance or the Reformation, if only because it took a while for the characteristics that would later be seen as defining a given period to become firmly established.

However, I believe it is fairly easy to determine that however fully dark the age, we are living in a period of imperial decadence and decline for the United States. One clue is the prospect of Bush-Clinton-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Clinton presidencies, along with the inability or unwillingness of most of those considered intellectual "elites" to understand and express in words and insightful articles the utter mediocrity of these political parasites. Another is the ability of certain people and institutions in the United States – think Fox News and much of the so-called religious right – to indulge in hero-worship of such a clearly inferior person, in terms of seasoning, character, curiosity and ability to see the world realistically rather than through the eyes of sheer fantasy , as our current president.

Perhaps the clearest indication of sheer decadence, however, is the emergence of what can only be called "torture chic" in certain sectors of our ruling classes. That it is not universally considered bizarre and outlandish that a president and most of his henchmen would spend so much of their political capital on publicly gaining the "legitimized" authority to torture people, and that they would be able to carry along most of the major ruling political party and (apparently) the vast majority of the most self-conscious and eager-to-be-acknowledged "religious" or nominally Christian people in the country along with them in this clearly barbaric quest cannot be anything but a sign of decadence.

Fooling Themselves

Of course many of those who are advocating making torture something close to the official policy of the United States deny, as does the president, that what they are advocating is torture. The president claims disingenuously that his calls for these "enhanced interrogation techniques" or "aggressive interrogation tactics" are not a license to torture, simply a plea for " clarification " so those in the field can have a bright line so they know what is authorized and what isn’t. But consider what they are talking about. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (with whom I disagree about many issues but not this one) wrote recently:

"According to an ABC News report from last fall, procedures used by C.I.A. interrogators have included forcing prisoners to ‘stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours;’ the ‘cold cell,’ in which prisoners are forced ‘to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees,’ while being doused with cold water; and, of course, water boarding, in which ‘the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet,’ and then ‘cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him,’ inducing ‘a terrifying fear of drowning.

"And bear in mind that the ‘few bad apples’ excuse doesn’t apply; these were officially approved tactics – and Mr. Bush wants at least some of these tactics to remain in use."

As numerous authorities and all of the professional interrogators I’ve talked to in the last few years claim, the use of such tactics – call them torture or not – does not (except in a few rare cases) elicit accurate information . Instead, the prisoner/detainee is more likely finally to tell the interrogators what he thinks they want to hear rather than the truth.

Phony Justifications

So the notion that there are instances, possibly numerous instances, when there is a need for key information right now because there is a bomb ticking somewhere near or an attack that is scheduled to take place within hours or minutes and torture is the only reliable way to get the information and save hundreds or thousands of lives is the stuff of fiction rather than reality. In the real world such worst-case scenarios are rare or non-existent, and torture is not only an unreliable way to get the information but is more likely a way to get false trails in multitudes. It can even lead to outcomes that in any relatively sane world would be profoundly embarrassing to the authorities so enamored of the purported need to torture.

For example, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was subjected both to the cold cell and waterboarding. Eventually he told interrogators that Saddam Hussein’s regime had trained al-Qaida members to use biochemical weapons. This "confession" became a key part of the administration's case for invading Iraq. But it was pure invention. And relying on it led to a huge disconnect between justification and the realities that emerged after the invasion of Iraq that would have been hugely embarrassing to the administration, if this administration were in fact capable of embarrassment.

Not that the president or anybody in the administration has even acknowledged, let alone apologized for, the mistakes and lies that led many Americans to support the invasion initially.

It is even more curious that in an administration in love with war that has declared so many times its admiration for the military and its desire to give the military anything it wants to succeed – except for sufficient vehicle and body armor, not to mention numbers of troops, in Iraq – is dead-set on getting torture (or close-to-torture if you insist) tactics authorized when almost all of the relevant military officials have not only said they don’t want the authority to use extreme interrogation tactics, but have come out explicitly against authorizing them.

Against Military Opposition

Colin Powell, not only former secretary of state but former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has not only opposed the administration’s approach to interrogation and detainee policies, he has worried about the U.S. losing its moral standing in the process. The three Republican senators with the most military experience – Virginia’s John Warner , a World War II vet, longtime chairman of the Armed Services Committee and in constant touch with top military officials, Arizona’s John McCain , a Vietnam vet who suffered torture himself as a POW, and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham , a former military lawyer – led the resistance – for a while, at least, until they folded like a cheap suit – to the administration approach.

The U.S. Army has recently revised its field manual on interrogation techniques and clearly declared that the practices described above and several others are off-limits for Army interrogators. That’s as close as we’re likely to get to an official military denunciation of the administration’s eagerness to see the use of torture officially approved.

So it isn’t that the civilians in the administration are trying to give the military and the CIA essential tools they think they need to save American lives. They are trying to foist on them tools that the military rather officially and explicitly, and many in the CIA, though perhaps less officially, specifically do not want to have, in large part because they understand they are barbaric and that their use undermines what they see as the legitimate use of force that is their bailiwick in a modern nation-state.

This fascination with torture is not just barbaric, it is downright sick. Why should people who consider themselves defenders of civilization be so eager to see them used?

Paul Krugman suggests that in the case of the administration it is simply

"To show that it can. The central drive of the Bush administration – more fundamental than any particular policy – has been the effort to eliminate all limits on the president’s power. Torture, I believe, appeals to the president and the vice president precisely because it’s a violation of both law and tradition.

"By making an illegal and immoral practice a key element of U.S. policy, they’re asserting their right to do whatever they claim is necessary. And many of our politicians are willing to go along."

Vicarious Toughness

That’s surely part of it. Although I’m leery of psychobiography, which used to be faddish in modern culture, and urge readers to take what follows with a grain or thousand of salt, I have another possible theory.

When I was in high school I was considered one of the "brains" or "nerds." I didn’t get into fights. In fact, I remember a particularly humiliating experience in my freshman year when a couple of bullies caught me in an isolated place on the street and made me bow and grovel before them. They didn’t actually hurt me, but they knew I was afraid they would, so they had control over me. I hated that experience and the memories of it that occasionally surfaced. Although in my head I knew that fighting was not the measure of a real man, it made me at least subconsciously harbor doubts about my manhood. Why hadn’t I stood up to these punks?

What I did about it was to go out for football. I wasn’t very good at it. I was small but I made up for it by being slow, so I ended up being an undersized lineman who didn’t get into games very often, especially if the games were close. But in practices and in the few games in which I played for significant periods of time, I proved to myself at least that I could hang in there with the biggest and toughest guys in our school and other schools. I got knocked around more than I knocked other people around, but I lost my fear of being knocked around and came back for more.

Since then nobody – literally – has tried to bully me physically, even though I am hardly an imposing physical specimen. There’s something about having physical self-confidence that deters bullies, even bullies who could probably mop up the floor with you if it came to a fight.

I suspect that many of our leaders never had the experience of proving to themselves that they were physically capable in that sort of way, and thus harbor doubts about their manhood. George W. didn’t play sports as his father – an All-American baseball player at Yale – did, but was instead a cheerleader . I’ve seen no record – maybe I’ve missed it – of Dick Cheney doing anything particularly physical that didn’t involve having a gun in his hands with the target a defenseless animal. Both passed up the opportunity to prove themselves in combat in the military.

I suspect that neither Dubya nor Cheney would personally torture people, although it’s possible if they were in a situation with others in which there was absolutely no chance of them actually getting hurt. But if they harbor, after all these years, a desire to prove they are tough that they never had a chance to validate personally and physically, I can imagine them – and plenty of other people in the political class – wanting to do so vicariously by authorizing – indeed, ordering – others to do it for them.

This may be incorrect, of course. I’m open to theories from others, perhaps eager to hear them. Because in the absence of some such explanation, the eagerness of the top two guys in the administration, plenty of others in the political classes and all too many who consider themselves thinkers or intellectuals to see torture become quasi-official policy of the United States, which used to have a reputation as the freest land on earth, verges on the sadistic and pornographic.

And it’s a clear sign of decadence.

(Alan Bock is Senior Essayist at the Orange County Register and a weekly columnist for WorldNetDaily .He is the author of Ambush at Ruby Ridge (Putnam-Berkley, 1995). He is also author of the new book Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana (Seven Locks Press). His exclusive column appears every Tuesday on Antiwar.com.]


Tracking the ‘Torture Taxi’ – by Onnesha Roychoudhuri (from TruthDig)

The authors of the new book “Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights” tell Truthdig guest interviewer Onnesha Roychoudhuri how they pieced together the first comprehensive look at the largest covert CIA operation since the Cold War—a program run not only by shadowy government contractors in the darkest corners of Afghanistan, but also by unassuming America family lawyers in places like Dedham, Mass.

When U.S. civilian airplanes were spotted in late 2002 taking trips to and from Andrews Air Force Base, and making stops in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, journalists and plane-spotters wondered what was going on. It soon became clear that these planes were part of the largest covert operation since the Cold War era. Called extraordinary rendition, the practice involves CIA officials or contractors kidnapping people and sending them to secret prisons around the world where they are held and often tortured, either at the hands of the host-country’s government or by CIA personnel themselves.

On Sept. 6, after a long period of official no-comments, President Bush acknowledged the program’s existence. But the extent of its operations has yet to be publicly disclosed.

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.

Trevor and A.C. joined me by phone to explain how they managed to follow a paper trail that led to some of the most critical unknowns about the extraordinary rendition program.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: How did the idea for the book come about?

Trevor Paglen: I research military secrecy at Berkeley and there is a community there trying to figure out what military programs are. At some point, this hobbyist community became aware that there were these civilian planes flying around, acting as if they were working in military black programs. These people started tracking the planes and repeatedly seeing them in places like Libya and Guantanamo Bay. It became pretty clear that this was a CIA thing and that these were planes that were involved in the extraordinary rendition program.

Roychoudhuri: When did the pieces start to come together?

Paglen: Late last year, there was a big uproar about secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Dana Priest at the Washington Post broke the story and Human Rights Watch put out a press release . At that moment the pieces started making sense and we could start explaining what was going on. By that time I had collected a number of files on this just as a curiosity. I brought them over to A.C.’s job, where he has access to some tools to do investigative journalism.

A.C. Thompson: Trevor had this aviation and military expertise and all this information when he came to my office. I’ve been doing corporate research for years and when we started looking at these possible CIA front companies associated with the planes, it immediately became very apparent that we were looking at phony companies.

Roychoudhuri: How did you track the extraordinary rendition program?

Thompson: We wanted to gather up as much information as we could to create this mosaic of evidence to show the broad picture of extraordinary rendition. We went from Smithfield, N.C., to Gardez, Afghanistan, to piece it together. This is something that people have only really had snapshots of thus far. We reverse-engineered the program. We used the paper trails and evidence left behind, from FAA flight logs to the testimony of former prisoners in Afghanistan to piece it all together.

Paglen: We conceived of the book as a travel diary. We showed up at the addresses on this paper trail and followed the leads. The point was to find the story behind the address. Then we would go to the places where those companies actually fly those airplanes and provide the pilots. Then, when we saw that the airplanes frequently landed in Afghanistan, we went there, too.

Roychoudhuri: You relied on data from amateur plane-spotters with data from all over the world. Can you explain how that works?

Paglen: There are many plane-spotting websites with data regarding the movements of these aircrafts along with pictures. The data can be very scattered and difficult to do much with. But some of these plane-spotters have developed advanced techniques to get information on aircraft movement. That became very helpful in piecing some of this together. If you are a plane-spotter and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA. And in the cases that data has been blocked, people have figured out ways to get around those blocks. When the plane-spotter community and journalists came together, it became one of the few ways to see the outlines of this program.

Roychoudhuri: The fact that the CIA is using civilian planes actually makes it easier to track them.

Paglen: Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world. The U.S. military needs special permission to fly over somebody else’s airspace. Using the civilian companies is a way to create mobility and avoid drawing attention.

Thompson: The CIA wants to exist in the civilian world. It wants to create these entities so that it can move without a lot of scrutiny. But in the civilian world, you have to interact with other parts of the government all the time. If you create a shell corporation that is going to supposedly own an airplane that will be used to transport people to dungeons around the world, you have to file incorporation papers with the state the company is based in. When you go and get these corporate papers, you can analyze things like the signatures on the documents.

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

Thompson: We found Colleen Bornt who was an exec at a company called Premier Executive Transport Services. Premier was the company that owned the plane that took Khaled el-Masri to the Salt Pit. When you go look at the paper documents that Colleen signed, you find that every one of her signatures looks completely different. That’s because each one was made by a different person. When we started looking for more traces of Colleen there was no home address, no phone number, nor any other proof that she’s existed at all.

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: What are these lawyers?

Thompson: These lawyers are the only humans you can find who actually exist in these companies. We went to look to talk to people at Keeler and Tate, another shell company implicated in el-Masri’s abduction. Keeler and Tate were sued by el-Masri with the help of the ACLU. We went to the only address for Keeler and Tate—a law office in Reno, Nevada. We told the secretary “One of the lawyers here is a registered agent and you have been named in a lawsuit alleging a connection to the CIA and extraordinary rendition, what do you think of that?” She didn’t seem at all surprised, but she threw us out pretty quickly.

Roychoudhuri: Who are these lawyers?

Thompson: The kind of people we’re talking about are Dean Plakias in Dedham, Mass., outside of Boston. He is not a high-profile guy. He’s a family lawyer with a small practice and how he ended up in this world is still a mystery. This is an American story, a neighborhood story. When we started looking at all the front companies the CIA had erected, we realized our neighbors were helping the CIA set up these structures. These are family lawyers in suburban Massachusetts and Reno, Nevada. People in our communities are doing dirty work for the CIA. This is not just people being snatched up from one faraway country and taken to a country that’s even farther away.

Roychoudhuri: When you have a false entity like Colleen Bornt signing for purchases of planes, is that breaking business laws?

Thompson: As far as I can tell, it’s 100% illegal under the business and professions codes in any state. I don’t think that it would be legal anywhere. I also don’t think that it’s legal in any state for a lawyer to set up a phony business for people who they know don’t exist. It’s also likely at odds with the ethics provisions of most state bar organizations for lawyers. Strictly speaking, I don’t think any of these things are legal.

Roychoudhuri: Where was the most interesting place you traveled?

Thompson: We went to Nevada, Massachusetts and New York to track down the front companies. We went to Beale Air Force base in Northern California to track U2 spy planes. We went to Smithfield, N.C, which is home to the airfields that many of these airplanes fly out of. Then we went to Kabul and Gardez, Afghanistan.

But the two most interesting places were the rural town of Smithfield and Kinston down the road, where there’s another airstrip that a company called Aero Contractors uses. Aero is the company that flies many of these missions for the CIA. We went there and talked to a pilot who had worked for Aero about exactly what they did and how the program worked. There’s nothing random about the CIA using this rural area in North Carolina. If you wanted to shut up a secret operation, this is where you would do it. It’s a God, guns and guts area.

Roychoudhuri: When you asked questions, what kind of answers did you get?

Thompson: What you start to figure out by spending time in Smithfield is that a lot of people know about the company and have at least an inkling of what goes on at the airport. Most don’t want to talk about it and don’t take a critical view of it. Folks we met there framed the debate within this religious discourse. The activists that we talked to were god-fearing devout Christians who felt like this was not what they signed up for as religious people, that it violates the religious tenets they adhere to. Interestingly, folks on the other side of the debate seem to be coming from a similar place, but just coming to a different conclusion. The subject of whether or not torture was permitted by the Bible was discussed in church there—and many congregants believed it was.

Paglen: It’s this small town with this open secret that nobody wants to talk about. It shows what’s going on culturally. When a country starts doing things like torturing and disappearing people, it’s not just a policy question, it’s also a cultural question.

Roychoudhuri: When you started to put the pieces of the rendition program together, what did you see?

Paglen: Take Khaled el-Masri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri) for example. His case was a blueprint for this program because it’s the most complete account. He showed up in Germany after having disappeared for five months and told this incredible story. His interrogators told him not to tell anybody because they wouldn’t believe him anyway. But when you excavate his story, there is a trail of evidence to corroborate it.

He says he was kidnapped in Macedonia on a certain day. It turns out that a plane-spotter took a picture of a known CIA airplane in Majorca [Spain] the day before el-Masri was kidnapped. German journalists went to the airport of Skopje [Macedonia] with this picture and verified the plane was there on that date. The plane had also filed a flight plan from Macedonia to Kabul. El-Masri said he was taken to Kabul. In Kabul, he said he was taken on a 10-minute drive to a prison. He drew a map of what he thought the prison floor plan was. We got on Google Earth, looked at Kabul and drew a ring around how far you could go in about 10 minutes. Then we compared the buildings in that ring to the map that el-Masri had drawn. We found a building that looks exactly like it. So we drove out there. There is indeed a giant facility with Americans there. He could not have made this up.

Roychoudhuri: You actually went to one of the places el-Masri believes he was held—the Salt Pit in Afghanistan.

Paglen: There have been at least three or four black sites in and around Kabul, Afghanistan. The one we definitely knew the location of was the Salt Pit. We found a driver who would take us out there. When you drive out to the Salt Pit, you have these wide plains; it’s very isolated. We were driving up and there was a traffic jam which was a goat herder with a bunch of goats on the road. As we’re waiting, he turns around and he’s wearing a hat that says KBR—Kellogg Brown and Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton). As we drove farther, we saw a huge complex with a big wall around it. There are signs in English saying this is an Afghan military facility, no entrance. There’s then a checkpoint. We were stopped. We told the guards we were turning around and going back to Kabul. We asked what goes on there and the guard said he didn’t know exactly. Then we asked if there were Americans there. And he said, “Oh yes, there’s lots of Americans here.” And we saw some Americans sitting on a Humvee.

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. We realized that the kinds of distinctions that we were making between CIA and military black sites, CIA and military torture made absolutely no sense to people. 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: From interviewing a lot of detainees and Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (http://www.aihrc.org.af/), 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: When A.C. interviewed people who had been held at the military air base Bagram, prisoners told him that there were Iraqis, Yemenis, an international cast of characters at this DOD prison. So what the hell are they doing there? These are not high-profile renditions like el-Masri or Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. 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: In the book, you make clear that the rendition program has been around for years. What has changed?

Paglen: The program was established over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican. For example, Aero Contractors was set up under the Carter administration. The counter-terrorist unit in the CIA was set up under the Reagan administration, but the rendition program was set up under Clinton. It’s an accumulation of the capacity of this infrastructure. After 9/11, the CIA went about setting up this entire infrastructure. Materially, they started getting airplanes and secret prisons together. They also started putting together a corporate structure, meaning shell companies. All of this was already in place, but not solidified. All the controls seemed to be taken off of it. They’re not planning each operation so meticulously, they’re not getting presidential authorization for each operation.

We’re hearing about it now because it grew so big, clearly expanding beyond what the intention of the program was at first. There is no question that some of these guys they’re picking up did nothing and are the wrong people. One of the differences between the pre- and post-9/11 is that the CIA becomes squarely in charge of the program. Before, the CIA was working with the FBI.

Thompson: The pre-9/11 program was geared more towards adjudicating people domestically who were suspected of crimes against American citizens. That was obviously not quite as controversial as running this huge program that’s snatching people and taking them to secret dungeons around the world.

Roychoudhuri: Clearly, other countries have to be at least partially aware of the program in order for the U.S. program to operate. Did you get a sense of the level of collaboration?

Paglen: We know that immediately after 9/11 the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly there is no paper trail.

Roychoudhuri: Has that off-the-record quality caused glitches in the program?

Paglen: What happened in October of 2001 is that one of these airplanes landed in Pakistan. The Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) picked up a guy named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2004/10/jamil_qasim_sae.html). The plane landed on the tarmac; they had this guy in chains. That guy was handed over to the Americans and put into this Gulfstream. They were going to fly him out of there, but the air traffic controllers require a landing fee and they refused to pay. The ISI then went to the airport officials and told them to waive the landing fee, so the plane took off. But it created a stir, and drew attention to the aircraft. A Pakistani journalist heard about this and published it, including the tail number of the plane in the newspaper. American journalists then got their hands on this tail number, and this is one of the very early keys that began to unlock parts of this story.

Roychoudhuri: As journalists have begun tracking plane numbers, the CIA has attempted to reshuffle. They change the number on the plane, or they change the phone line of the shell companies. How much do you think public scrutiny can achieve?

Thompson: A ton. If people want the CIA to be reined in and if they feel we shouldn’t go around the world summarily detaining and torturing people, they can truly pressure their government to make that happen. They did it in the ’70s through Frank Church, the Idaho senator, and the Church Committee. They severely curbed the transgressions and the misdeeds of the CIA. The thing is, by and large Americans don’t care about this. Europeans, who play a much smaller role in this, are absolutely outraged about it; their governments are outraged about it. The day Americans decide that they don’t think torture is something we should do, than maybe we’ll see some pressure to change these things.

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 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5321606.stm) 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.

(Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. A former assistant editor of AlterNet.org, she has written for AlterNet, MotherJones.com, Women’s e-News, and PopMatters)