'Torture Taxi' by Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson
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The best way to keep a really big secret is to hide it in plain sight.
It would appear that the CIA understood this lesson well because it worked wonders in disguising its increasingly common practice of "extraordinary rendition" or kidnapping foreign nationals and taking them to other countries for interrogation (and possibly torture).
By Trevor Paglen
and A.C. Thompson
Melville House ($23)
While journalists poked and prodded details out of the government, tangible evidence of this policy was parked at airstrips around the nation.
As SF Weekly journalist A.C. Thomson and Trevor Paglen discovered, these details were easy to obtain. With just a minuscule amount of digging, plane spotters deduced that civilian aircraft were making regular runs to destinations such as Guantanamo Bay, Baghdad and Kabul.
These planes came home to roost in places such as Reno, Nev.; Smithfield, N.C.; and Dedham, Mass.
There is a precedent for it, Thompson and Paglen remind -- the covert CIA airline, Air America. From the late 1940s to the early '70s, this aircraft fleet flew black-op missions in Southeast Asia until Congress stopped it.
But the secret airline didn't just vanish; the CIA, like the military today, simply began outsourcing its work. Thompson and Paglen write that the agency drew upon former Air America pilots to create shell companies.
The seeds to the program, the authors say, were actually planted during the Reagan era, when Congress, rattled by waves of terrorist bombings and drug crimes, passed a law allowing the FBI to investigate crimes against Americans outside U.S. borders.
Rendition flights started in the mid-1990s under President Clinton, as Thompson and Paglen reveal, and it slowly became the purview of the CIA.
"Torture Taxi" pieces together a vivid mosaic of the CIA's shell companies and making evident how they operate. Much of this information is actually already on public record, but Paglen and Thompson do an admirable job of synthesizing it and decoding it.
When they try to visit the destination of these torture taxis, a series of "black site" prisons around Eastern Europe and in Afghanistan, the mood turns darker.
"At first torture was done by proxy," the authors explain. But after 9/11, torture "was not to be carried out only by proxy nations. As soon as the CIA had established its own "black site" prisons, CIA agents started torturing detainees with their own hands."
This book is a powerful reminder that the moral responsibility of what has been done in the name of our safety lies closer than some might think. After all, it all began on a runway near you.
First Published February 11, 2007 12:00 am
