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This is a good piece from Hentoff in this weeks VILLAGE VOICE
Nat Hentoff
Have a Nice Flight
Boeing helps CIA fly kidnapped suspects abroad for torture
On the Boeing 737 Business Jet, Khaled el-Masri said, “all the
people were in black clothes and black masks. They put earplugs in my
ears and a sack over my head.” After putting chains on his legs, they
led him onto the plane. “They threw me on the floor and injected me
with something. I blacked out.”
—From Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program,
Stephen Grey (St. Martin’s Press)
Last month, a judge in Milan, Italy, began a hearing on kidnapping
charges against 26 Americans, most of them CIA agents, that could lead
to the first trial anywhere on the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions.”
Scores of flights to torture chambers have been documented—along
with flight logs from European and American official aviation
sources—by human rights organizations and in Stephen Grey’s
extensively sourced book Ghost Plane.
The CIA agents in Italy left behind bountiful evidence of their
violations of Italian and international laws. But the U.S. will not
extradite them to Italy for doing their duty under special orders from
the president on September 17, 2001, orders that gave the agency
unprecedented latitude to engage in “clandestine intelligence activity”
in the war on terrorism.
This Bush “notification memorandum” is “Top Secret.” Vermont
senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is
striving mightily to get Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to provide
him with this further proof of how the administration has been
operating—as Dick Cheney advised right after 9-11—”on the
dark side.”
In any case, the CIA kidnappers under scrutiny in Italy, along
with rampantly lawless agents elsewhere, cannot be tried in the U.S. as
long as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is in effect. The
president got the Republican-controlled Congress, in that legislation,
to give CIA lawbreakers a retroactive get-out-of-jail-free card for
their work on “the dark side.”
Meanwhile, although the CIA “renditions” are no longer secret—and Ghost Plane
writer Grey has recently been talking about them to members of
Congress—little has been revealed about the private American
airline companies that have been supplying the CIA with the planes to
transport the shackled, blindfolded, drugged passengers for
interrogation in foreign torture chambers.
But now The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer—in her most
recent meticulously documented report on the execution of this
administration’s violations of our own War Crimes Act and the Geneva
Conventions—has revealed the complicity of the world’s largest
aerospace company, Boeing, in some of these CIA kidnappings.
Her investigation, “The CIA’s Travel Agent,” appeared in the October 30 New Yorker;
but oblivious to her disclosures, Boeing has been receiving a
celebratory press: “Boeing Takes Lead in Aircraft Orders: Company Tops
Airbus for the First Time Since 2000” (Washington Post, January 17) and “Why Boeing’s Flying High” (George Will’s widely syndicated column, in the January 18 New York Post).
Mayer found out that Boeing has a subsidiary—Jeppesen
International Trip Planning, based in San Jose, California—that
proclaims it “offers everything needed for efficient, hassle-free,
international flight operations . . . from Aachen to Zhengzhou.”
A number of American charter airlines—front companies
for the CIA—are involved in “renditions,” but, Mayer notes, the
Boeing subsidiary handles “many of the logistical and navigational
details—including flight plans, clearance to fly over other
countries, hotel reservations, and ground-crew arrangements.”
Consider the kidnapped Khaled el-Masri’s account of the CIA
flight attendants in black clothes and black masks who took him in a
Boeing 737 Business Jet to Afghanistan to be tortured. The flight plans
for el-Masri’s unforgettable trip were prepared, Mayer reports, by the
superbly reliable Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen International Trip
Planning.
She quotes a former Jeppesen employee about what Jeppesen’s
managing director, Bob Overby, said at an internal corporate meeting:
“We do all of the extraordinary renditions flights—you know, the
torture flights. Let’s face it, some of those flights end up that way .
. . It certainly pays well.”
Overby didn’t return any of Mayer’s phone calls. When I tried
to reach Overby in San Jose, I couldn’t even get put through to his
office. And Boeing headquarters in Chicago told me it was unaware of
that subsidiary. (This was after Mayer’s article appeared.)
With ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, Khaled el-Masri is trying to
sue the CIA—and Boeing may, in time, be included as a defendant.
Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis III would not even start a trial
because the government invoked the “state secrets” privilege. But as
Wizner said (The New York Times, November 29), the trial would
only confirm “what the entire world entirely knows” from reports in the
world press. (The case is on appeal.)
As I noted in a previous column, Judge Ellis did moisten his
decision dismissing the case in the lower court with crocodile tears,
saying el-Masri might have suffered a great injustice, but the judge’s
hands were tied by the Justice Department’s “state secrets” maneuver.
Not incidentally, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—in
her previous post as National Security Adviser—had ordered Khalid
el-Masri released in May 2004. Sorry, she said, he had been mistakenly
identified as being connected to terrorism. (She did not say who
misfingered him.)
Khaled el-Masri, who hasn’t been able to get a job since his
release, is suing for damages, but primarily, he says, he’d like an
apology. He is as likely to get one from the CIA or Commander in Chief
Bush as he is from the world’s largest aerospace company.
When the CIA is Boeing’s client, does Jeppesen supply the
black masks too? On January 31, German prosecutors issued arrest
warrants for 13 CIA agents involved in the rendition of el-Masri.
Involved in the kidnapping, said the prosecutors, was a Boeing plane.
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