I recently ran across a brief article in one of the daily newspapers here in North Carolina that described an effort by some of this state's legislators to begin an investigation of Aero Contractors and its involvement in the US government's rendition program. As most readers know, this program involves kidnapping, detaining and transporting individuals considered the enemy to prisons around the world where they are then tortured and kept incommunicado for months and years. The legislative effort is but one result of the efforts of a group known as North Carolina Stop Torture Now. What follows is the transcript of an email interview with Raleigh, NC resident and long-time peace and justice activist Christina Cowger, who serves as the group's coordinator.
Ron: Hello. Let me start by asking you to introduce yourself and the group? How long have you been around? Are you connected to any church or larger group?
Christina: 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 (http://peace.meetup.com/96/). Anti-torture students are active at Eastern Carolina University (http://www.clubhouse.ecu.edu/peaceandjustice/) and UNC-Asheville. We're also communicating with anti-torture activists in Massachusetts, the Bay Area, Oregon, and Washington, DC.
Ron: What compelled your group to take on the issue of torture in Guantanamo and other prisons around the world set up for that purpose?
Christina: The story of Khaled El-Masri, perhaps the best-known victim of rendition, certainly galvanized a lot of us into action (http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/rendition.html). Those familiar with the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Central America know that the use of disappearance, torture, and clandestine prisons is nothing new in U.S. covert operations. But it's also clear that since 9/11, the CIA has carried out a massive escalation in kidnapping and detention, completely outside the norms of national and international law.
We see this as one of the Bush Administration's most heinous abuses of power, although certainly not the only one. It appalls us and many others that a national "debate" about torture could even arise. To paraphrase journalist Mark Danner, even if it could be shown that torture was effective, it's immoral, and that's reason enough to fight against it. Further, CIA-sponsored torture fuels the hatred of people all over the world for the U.S. and its allies, which increases instability and makes everyone less safe.
What's wrong with rendition is not just that most of the victims are tortured, although that's bad enough. Rendition means "disappearing" people and detaining them indefinitely, outside the rule of law.
Ron: Can you provide the readers with an outline of how you understand the renditions process to work?
Christina: Briefly, since 9/11 the rendition program was transformed into a large-scale campaign to detain and interrogate those targeted in the U.S. "war on terror" -- clandestinely and outside U.S. and international law. Stephen Grey's book 'Ghost Plane' provides a meticulously documented account of rendition and its antecedents under Clinton.
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.
Many of these detainees have been thrown into notorious jails in Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and Morocco, where conditions are inhumane and torture is brutal. Some have ended up in prisons run directly by the CIA -- the so-called "black sites" -- in eastern Europe or Afghanistan. Many have been rendered from prison to prison by Aero Contractors. In all cases, there is no due process, no habeas corpus, no communication with family for months and even years.
Ron: To your knowledge, is the United States still involved in renditions and torture?
Christina: President Bush claimed in his September 6, 2006, speech that the "black sites" had been emptied, and their inmates rendered to Guantanamo. As Stephen Grey points out, this begs the question of what happened to the hundreds of detainees who entered the rendition system and remain missing.
The Military Commissions Act, passed by a gutless Congress before the 2006 fall elections, gave Bush a significant victory. Under the MCA, if you are declared an enemy combatant, you lose your habeas corpus rights. This is true whether or not you are a U.S. citizen, although it will no doubt be applied mainly to non-citizens. Given this victory, we guess that Bush and the CIA feel emboldened to continue the extraordinary rendition program. Of course, it is difficult to confirm this directly.
Ron Jacobs is a writer, library worker and anti-imperialist. He is the author of The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground (Verso 1997) His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is now available at Amazon, and many other stores.
