Wednesday, November 17th, 2004
U.S. Operating Secret 'Torture Flights'
Democracy Now
The Sunday Times of London is reporting that it has obtained evidence
that the US government is leasing a special Gulfstream Jet to
transport detained suspects to other nations that routinely use
torture in their prisons. We speak with the reporter who broke the
story. [includes rush transcript] The Sunday Times of London has
obtained evidence that the US government is leasing a special
Gulfstream Jet to transport detained suspects to other nations that
routinely use torture in their prisons. Logs for the airplane show the
Pentagon and CIA have used the plane more than 300 times and dropped
off detainees in Syria, Egypt and Uzbekistan. The Gulfstream and a
similarly anonymous-looking Boeing 737 are hired by American agents
from Premier Executive Transport Services, a private company in
Massachusetts.
Analysis of the plane's flight plans, covering more than two years,
shows that it always departs from Washington DC. It has flown to a
total of 49 destinations outside the US, including the Guantanamo Bay
prison camp in Cuba and other US military bases, as well as Egypt,
Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan.
Witnesses have claimed that the suspects are frequently bound, gagged
and sedated before being put on board the planes, which do not have
special facilities for prisoners but are kitted out with tables for
meetings and screens for presentations and in-flight films. The US
plane is not used just for carrying prisoners but also appears to be
at the disposal of defense and intelligence officials on assignments
from Washington.
* Stephen Grey, journalist with the Sunday Times of London who
exposed this week how the US is operating secret flights to transport
detainees to countries that torture prisoners.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: We're joined by Stephen Grey, who is a journalist with
the Sunday Times, who exposed the story this week, how the U.S. is
operating these secret flights. Welcome to Democracy Now!
STEPHEN GREY: Hi.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us further about these flights, who the
people are, and how you found out about them?
STEPHEN GREY: Well, first of all, it has remained something of a
mystery, the whole story. Obviously, bit by bit, the whole -- this
kind of secret world is unraveling. And we are getting more and more
information about the individual cases, where these planes are being
used. What it exposes is the tentacles of a wider system whereby
prisoners are being taken in the war on terror, not only to
Guantanamo, but to many other place and those places include the
prisons of so-called allies of the U.S. and Britain, around the world.
Those countries which are allies of the U.S. include countries where
torture is routine. Obviously, the concerns that many people have are
that these kind of transfers basically allow the U.S. to pass
prisoners into the hands of the secret police of other countries to do
the kind of interrogation, torture in fact, of prisoners that the U.S.
is not allowed to do itself. Kind of torture by proxy.
AMY GOODMAN: The company, can you talk about that?
STEPHEN GREY: Yeah. I mean, I think the company is not that important
in a sense. These are private planes. They're being leased. They're
not marked. That's the point about them. They can appear anywhere, and
you have, you know, innocent-looking, if you like, executive jets
parked on the runways of airports around the world. No one is to know
they're actually planes run by the U.S. military and intelligence
services. So, they have a perfect cover, if you like. But it's --
what's happening is that -- I mean, they're hired from a company that
operates in Massachusetts, and others. But you know, they're probably
just a normal, private company. What they're doing is leasing it out.
They only work for the government. As I say, the plane is not just
used for carrying prisoners. It's also used for transferring of
interrogators and also regular V.I.P. and defense and intelligence
officials from Washington. But what we have found is at least four
cases which have emerged where this plane has been seen actually
picking up prisoners, and in the first case which we discovered, the
prisoner was -- the two prisoners were taken from Sweden to Egypt, and
at the time -- this has happened just after September 11, and it's
been going on since, but in this case, just after September 11, two
prisoners were taken on board. The Swedish government never mentioned
the U.S. at the time. They said they were just sending -- extraditing
two prisoners. What actually happened was that the U.S. was there with
the secret plane. They stripped these men of their clothes, handcuffed
them, put them in diapers, gave them sedatives against their will, put
them on the plane, and took them to Egypt. And since then, we have
discovered these planes -- these prisoners complained of being very
seriously tortured with electric shocks all over their bodies as a
result of being taken to Egypt. That's the consequence of this kind of
process which we know is rendition.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Grey, I want to thank you for being with us, the
Sunday Times of London, exposing the U.S. torture flights.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=/11/17/1525208
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