By Evan Thomas,
an editor at Newsweek and the author of "Sea of Thunder: Four Naval Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign"
Tuesday, November 14, 2006; C03
GHOST PLANE
The True Story of the CIA Torture Program
By Stephen Grey
St. Martin's. 372 pp. $25.95
The CIA has long used euphemisms to mask dark acts. During the early Cold War, the agency's covert-action arm -- later more forthrightly labeled the Directorate of Operations -- was known as the Directorate of Plans, and its assassination plots were called "executive actions." These days, the business of outsourcing spying is known as "liaison relations." That mild terminology glosses over an uncomfortable reality: For many years, the CIA has been forced to rely heavily on local security services for intelligence, particularly in the Middle East. Unfortunately, those security services are the same brutal secret police who prop up corrupt autocracies standing in the way of democracy, such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
After Sept. 11, 2001, America became even more dependent on the intelligence arms of unsavory regimes, including terrorist havens like Syria (no friend of al-Qaeda but cozy with Hamas and Hezbollah). The CIA had few trained, Arabic-speaking interrogators to question al-Qaeda suspects, and they were quickly overwhelmed by the thousands of Islamist radicals captured in Afghanistan or seized as part of the global war on terrorism. The CIA's only recourse, it seemed at the time, was simply to put these suspected terrorists on a plane to, say, Egypt, and let the local police take care of them.
These "extraordinary renditions," as they are benignly known, could be horrific. The secret police of Middle Eastern countries freely torture, and their tools of the trade -- as Stephen Grey shows in his powerful and damning "Ghost Plane" -- include razor blades applied to genitals. (Small cuts leave no scars.) Officially, of course, the United States "does not torture," as President Bush has said, and, officially, we ask other countries not to torture prisoners "rendered" into their custody by the United States. But renditions have been carried out with winks and nods and legalistic dodges. The veil has been fairly thin: The Bush administration signaled its true intentions from the beginning. Less than a week after 9/11, Vice President Cheney told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" that the United States would be working "sort of the dark side" and "spending time in the shadows." The harsh particulars leaked out over time, in part thanks to enterprising journalists such as Grey.
A former head of the London Sunday Times investigative team, Grey began his excavation with the public record -- tracking the tail numbers and flight plans of mysterious executive jets flying between places like Johnston County, N.C. (conveniently near a Special Forces base at Fort Bragg) and Morocco or Uzbekistan. These "ghost planes," chartered by the CIA (or "OGA" -- other government agencies, as the CIA is referred to by military bureaucrats) have carried hundreds of suspected terrorists to the dungeons and torture chambers of America's allies in the Middle East and Central Asia, Grey reports. He has interviewed spooks and diplomats and soldiers, as well as the victims of torture, all over the world. His writing style tends to fall into the "It-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night" genre, and like most investigative reporters, he is a little too eager to dump out the entire contents of his notebook. But he is a prodigious digger and more than a single-minded muckraker. While acknowledging that "coercive interrogation techniques" have their uses, he offers a reasoned analysis of their pros and cons before ultimately concluding that the utility of the intelligence gained by torture is vastly outweighed by the harm done in the global battle for hearts and minds.
His attention to detail can be chilling. Grey tells the story of Maher Arar, a Canadian computer engineer picked up at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport in September 2002 while returning from a Tunisian holiday with his wife and two small children. Placed by U.S. agents on a luxurious private jet, Arar looked at the plush leather seats and wondered: "Am I that important for them?" He was given a very nice dinner, which reminded him of the Muslim tradition "called Eid, where they slaughter an animal, and before they slaughter the animal they feed him." He was flown to Jordan, driven to Syria and soon thrown into a coffin-like cell in a dank jail, where he was beaten on the arms, palms and soles of his feet with electric cables. After 10 months, he was returned to his family (his wife had raised a ruckus with the Canadian government, which eventually intervened with the Syrians). Arar's arrest and rendition were mistaken: He had once been seen having a meal with a man suspected of jihadist activities and ended up on a terrorist watch list, but he was entirely innocent. After a Canadian judicial inquiry was released in September, the country's top Mountie apologized publicly to Arar and his family for the "terrible injustices" they endured.
Arar may be the grotesque exception. Many of the jihadists spirited off to Middle Eastern torture chambers are genuine threats. But there is precious little evidence that torturing them has produced what the spooks call "actionable intelligence." Former secretary of state Colin Powell's February 2003 case to the United Nations for going to war with Iraq was built partly on intelligence gathered from a senior al-Qaeda military trainer named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Rendered to Egypt by the United States, al-Libi confessed under torture that al-Qaeda operatives had been sent to Saddam Hussein's Iraq to learn more about chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi later recanted his confession. He had just been trying to make the pain stop.
