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 coats--unidentifiable from one another and without speaking a single word--would 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."
"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.
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."
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.
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."
Confronting these issues is not easy. It takes courage. It takes persistence. It takes fortitude.
But we must not be bystanders.
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."
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."
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."
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.
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 Delta--the "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 seriously--and may even have continued--a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006."
"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."
And the horrid revelations continue.
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."
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."
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