Shining a Light on CIA Torture

They were U.S. “torture taxis” in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Playing a key role in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition,” detention, and interrogation program, the two aircraft flew at least 34 separate “rendition circuits” that resulted in the kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture of at least 49 individuals, according to the U.K.-based Rendition Project, a coalition of academics, human rights investigators, legal teams, and investigative journalists who waded through reams of data, including falsified and redacted flight plans and other reports, to uncover the truth about the CIA program and its victims.

A typical flight circuit, according to The Rendition Project, went like this:

• A jet would take off from Johnston County Airport, about 30 miles south of Raleigh, and fly to Washington, D.C., to pick up the CIA “snatch team.”
• It would then fly across the Atlantic and stop for refueling somewhere in Europe.
• The next stop would be the pick-up location, often in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but also in Egypt, Gambia, Morocco, Malawi, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Djibouti, Macedonia, and elsewhere.
• Dummy flight plans would often be filed to obscure the true drop-off destinations, which included the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, CIA “black sites” in Poland, Romania, Afghanistan, and Lithuania—and one in Thailand that was run by now CIA director Gina Haspel.
• After delivering the prisoner, the plane would fly to a “rest and relaxation” location to refuel and to allow the CIA team to recover before being flown back to Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C.
• The final leg took the plane and flight crew home to Johnston County.

The commission against torture is following the lead of previous truth commissions, including its own state’s Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and another focused on the 1898 Wilmington race riot—both of whose members and staff provided advice. The independent, nongovernmental torture commission held public hearings in November and December to investigate and encourage public debate about the role North Carolina played in facilitating the U.S. torture program between 2001 and 2006.

“For these advocates in North Carolina and across the country to help expose the secret detention and rendition operations of our own government, they are taking on the sacred cow that says governments can do whatever they want in the name of national security,” said Rev. Ron Stief, executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. “Their actions couldn’t be more biblical,” said Stief.

War crimes in your backyard

What began as whispered rumors became documented fact with reports from The New York Times and the 7,000-page report on CIA torture released by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2014. The truth about Johnston County Airport-based Aero Contractors, whose leaders were respected members of the community, was that it was a CIA front company.

Christina Cowger, an agricultural researcher, and Allyson Caison, a realtor, formed the group North Carolina Stop Torture Now in 2005. The group’s initial activities included writing letters of apology to victims, airport demonstrations, adopting the road in front of Aero Contractors for trash pickup, telling the stories about victims, and—every month for four years—speaking at the meetings of the Johnston County board of commissioners to call for an accountability investigation. Those calls, as did similar ones made to state officials, went unanswered for so long that members formed the commission on torture to create public, civil society accountability.

The commission’s stated purpose is “to do the job that their government refuses to do: investigate North Carolina’s involvement in the U.S. torture program and its resulting obligations under international treaties and domestic law.”

Though Aero Contractors has not responded to invitations to address the commission, there have been other high-profile witnesses. In 2001, Alberto Mora was appointed by George W. Bush to be general counsel of the Navy, the most senior civilian lawyer for the U.S. Navy. In that position, Mora received information in December 2002 regarding detainee abuse by the U.S. military at Guantánamo. Even though the allegations fell outside his area of command, Mora “chose to inquire further.” His actions raised the first red flag that the Bush administration had sanctioned the use of torture in interrogation.

When Mora testified before the commission, he described how the administration he served, “gripped by fear and fury after 9/11,” made a terrible mistake in 2002 in granting the CIA permission to use “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In addition to the immorality of using torture, Mora said it also was a strategic policy error, and that it damaged individual victims and our international standing as a nation in lasting and complex ways.

Part of the commission’s work is to disabuse Americans of the widely held view that torture is a “necessary evil,” effective in obtaining useable information. It is not, says Robin Kirk. “Even though every piece of evidence we have shows us that torture not only doesn’t work, that it’s counterproductive, there’s something visceral about it that people just believe,” said Kirk, faculty co-chair of the Duke Human Rights Center and a NCCIT commissioner.

Kirk’s fellow commissioners include retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005; Jonathan Freeman, a Truman National Security Project fellow and former active duty U.S. Army officer who fought in Iraq; and Frank Goldsmith, an attorney who represented five Taliban prisoners held at Guantánamo. During two full days of public hearings in 2017, the commission recorded testimony from torture survivors, former government officials, and legal and human rights experts.

The kidnapped

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of Guantánamo Diary, was held in Guantánamo without charge or trial for 14 years. According to his testimony and unclassified documents, Slahi was arrested by authorities in his native Mauritania in September 2001 and questioned for two weeks by Mauritanian secret service and U.S. FBI agents. He was released with no charge. Slahi was asked to come in again for questioning in November 2001, which he did voluntarily. He was then interrogated for eight days. On Nov. 28, a CIA rendition plane run by Aero Contractors transported Slahi from Mauritania to a prison in Jordan.

“I was taken on a plane that had six people beside myself, all Jordanians. I stayed in Jordan for eight months ... under heavy interrogation treatment,” Slahi testified via Skype.

In July 2002, another CIA rendition team picked up Slahi. He was stripped, blindfolded, diapered, shackled, and flown to the Bagram U.S. military base in Afghanistan, where he was interrogated for two weeks. Then Slahi was put onto a military transport with 34 other prisoners and flown to Guantánamo. He entered the detention camp on Aug. 5, 2002, where his torture regimen was overseen by Chicago police detective Richard Zuley and personally approved by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Slahi was finally returned to his family in Mauritania on Oct. 17, 2016.

“I want to say thank you to the people of North Carolina for standing up for people who cannot stand up for themselves,” Slahi told the commission. “This unholy marriage between your [U.S.] Securitate apparatus and dictatorships in this region [North Africa] ... this everlasting relationship has to be broken. It has to stop.”

Khadija Anna Pighizzini also testified via Skype, through an interpreter, from Bergamo, Italy. Her husband, Abou Elkassim Britel, was 34 years old in 2001 when he left on a five-month research trip to Iran as part of a project to translate a classic commentary on the Quran into Italian. Ten years later, he returned home, gray-haired, anxious, and unable to work. He had been arrested in March 2002 in Lahore, Pakistan, on his return from Iran. “From that day on, Kassim Britel becomes a missing man,” said Britel’s wife through a translator. He was interrogated and tortured by Pakistani and U.S. officials in such brutal ways that he required medical assistance. He was subjected to threats of death and the rape of women in his family, and he continued to be denied contact with Italian authorities.

Eventually, Britel was blindfolded, put in chains, and taken to an airplane, according to his wife. “The protocol is precise and designed to induce terror in the victim, with the horrible fear that he is about to be killed. Kassim is no exception: He is terrified, he does not understand, maybe his life will end there,” she said. His description of the actual rendering—being blindfolded and thrown into the plane, beaten, threatened, his mouth duct-taped, and refused access to a bathroom—corresponded with many other stories. The airplane, the Gulfstream N379P, had departed from Johnston County in North Carolina. It was operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services; the crew filed false flight plans through a Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, all of whom worked on behalf of the CIA.

‘How can we forget them?’

“Between September 2001 and September 2006, our database shows over 800 flights by N379P and N313P,” Sam Rafael, The Rendition Project co-director, said in his testimony. “These two aircraft landed hundreds of times at locations known to have played a role in the CIA’s torture program.” The Rendition Project has the most comprehensive public account of those detained and tortured within the CIA’s program and the largest public database of rendition flights by CIA aircraft.

Once “rendered,” the victims—many of whom were later determined to have been wrongfully detained—were subjected to waterboarding and other torture tactics that are condemned as immoral by the 164 states party to the U.N. Convention Against Torture—of which the U.S. has been a signatory since 1988.

Caison, co-founder of North Carolina Stop Torture Now, also testified before the commission. She explained how a self-described “middle-aged, real-estate agent, soccer mom” became involved in working to end torture. “I consider myself an activist; I am a person of faith; and I am a mom,” she told the commissioners.

“The activist in me believes that I can change the world while making it a better place and that sometimes my ideas are better than the ones of those in power,” Caison said. “As a person of faith, I have to. Right? Once you have the knowledge, you can’t ignore the men in cages, left there to be forgotten or die. And as a mother, I like to think if somehow my boys were kidnapped and tortured that there would be another mother out there ... like me, trying to end an injustice that begins in my neighborhood. ... What we do for the least of these, we do for God.”

What ‘intrinsic evil’ looks like

The commission on torture is shining light on these abuses and will do so to an even greater extent with its report, due out this fall. The main objective of faith communities, according to Stief, is “to educate people on what torture really looks like, the impact it has on those who have been tortured, and why it is immoral in every situation and circumstance. A Christian who supports torturing another human being made in God’s image, just to somehow feel the illusion of safety, is committing apostasy, not faith.”

Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA analyst turned anti-torture activist who has not been directly involved with the commission, said he was taught during his undergraduate studies at the Jesuit Fordham University that there is a moral category called “intrinsic evil”—actions that are always wrong, including rape, slavery, and torture. He believes more Americans of faith would stand up if they had better, more transparent reporting about torture. The media, “owned and operated by corporations and others that profit and profiteer on secret operations, can deprive Americans of the information necessary to move them to action,” McGovern said.

According to commissioner Kirk, the deep racial divide that plagues the United States plays into the question of torture as it does almost everything else. “It’s just so persistent and so pernicious,” Kirk said, “but we just don’t seem to be able to really engage with it,” adding that we still must try. “We have to be uncovering the police brutality or unfairness in the schools or whatever, but we also have to have a tremendous amount of patience.”

Stief also noted the role of race, and says the faith community must stand up. “With the rendition flights it was almost all Muslims. In our U.S. prisons it’s largely black and brown bodies. It all comes from the same mindset of racism and bigotry, and unfortunately that’s the mentality that drives the White House right now,” he said. “If ever there was a time for the church to raise its voice, now is the time.”

Mora hopes the commission’s work will help citizens impact national policy, noting that the Trump administration “appears to be inclined to repeat some of the same policy mistakes of the Bush administration.”

“The president has communicated his disdain for human rights and has signaled that the U.S. would no longer seek to lead in this area or to conduct our foreign policy consonant with human rights ideals. He may not be torturing, at least not yet, but has declared his support for torture. He has suggested that international law and the laws of war should not bind U.S. military operations. He has signaled his preference for autocrats, such as Vladimir Putin, and a disdain for committed democrats, like Angela Merkel. He prioritizes a brute force approach to international problems while discounting diplomacy. And he is pursuing a strategy he calls ‘America First,’ but which has been aptly described as ‘America Only’ or ‘America Alone,’” said Mora.

“As was the case with the Bush administration’s torture policies, these policies are not aligned with our strategic interests. Because they don’t embody our values, they don’t represent who we are or who we wish to be,” Mora added. “They will not make the U.S. a better country or the world a safer place.”