Torture, Inc.: in Ghost Plane, investigative reporter Stephen Grey uncovers the ugly details of the CIA's post-9/11 torture programs.

Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, by Stephen Grey, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006, 372 pages, hardcover. (To order, please see the ad on the inside front cover.)

It was a plot worthy of Ian Fleming. In the days before February 17, 2003, a group of CIA agents gathered in Milan, Italy. In that city, famous for its Medieval and Renaissance intrigues, the American agents, perhaps trying to live up to the Bond mythos, checked in to the most luxurious hotels under assumed names, pretending to be wealthy power brokers of business and industry. The truth was less glamorous. They were there to perpetrate a crime.

On the morning of the 17th, Osama Nasr, better known as Abu Omar ("father of Omar" in Arab tradition), left home to walk to a Milan mosque to pray. Soon after leaving, he briefly noticed a white van. It appeared again as he got near the mosque. This time, the van stopped and two men jumped out, demanding in Italian that Nasr show them his papers. Nasr, an Egyptian, complied, showing the men papers documenting that he had been granted political asylum in Italy.

It was all a ruse. The men, CIA agents who the night before were living the high life in Milan's best accommodations, grabbed Nasr, sprayed something into his mouth and nose, then threw him into the back of the van where they covered his mouth with a sticky plaster-like gag. With their victim restrained, the kidnappers drove five hours to the U.S. air base at Aviano where Nasr says he was then beaten, tortured, and interrogated before being bundled onto an airplane and flown first to Rome and then to Cairo, Egypt. Abu Omar had just become the latest victim of "extraordinary rendition," the program adopted by the Bush administration after 9/11 as the best way to deal with those captured in Afghanistan and in the wider "War on Terror."

The history of that program is now the subject of an important book by investigative journalist Stephen Grey. The importance of the book cannot be overstated and it warrants an extended review. Titled Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, the book tells the stories of several of those who, like Abu Omar, got caught in the wide net cast by the CIA in the wake of 9/11. Along the way, as a result of painstaking research, Grey unravels the unsavory details of the super-secret program of extraordinary rendition, a program that its proponents argue is needed to keep America safe from terrorism but that has proven to be a dangerous betrayal of the values that historically have made America uniquely the land of the free.

Slippery Slope 

As a tool of law enforcement, rendition--essentially kidnapping a suspect, even overseas, and returning him to the United States for trial--dates back at least to the 1880s. Grey points to the case of Frederick Ker who was wanted for larceny in Cook County, Illinois. Ker was captured by a federal agent in Peru and shipped back to the United States to stand trial. Grey notes that in its December 6, 1886 ruling in Ker v. Illinois, "The Supreme Court judged that the manner in which [Ker] arrived before the court was of no importance to a U.S. court." Over the next 100 years, what became known as the "Ker doctrine" was upheld by the courts several times. But in all such cases, the suspect was brought back to the United States to stand trial. That began to change in the fight against terrorism.

According to Grey, "when the CIA started covertly targeting Al Qaeda in the mid-1990s, the approach was different." Under the new doctrine, suspects need no longer be returned to the United States. "This was now ... defined as 'extraordinary rendition'--the transfer of the suspect not back to the United States but to a third country, usually the suspect's native home, for incarceration and imprisonment there," Grey writes.

Even so, the program as constructed in the mid-1990s does not seem to have been intended to be as subversive and dangerous as it would later become. Instead, it was created by people within the CIA who were struggling to come to grips with the danger posed by terrorists, especially Osama bin Laden, but who were given very little support in their efforts by political higher-ups in the then-Clinton administration.

Leading this effort was Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden (OBL) unit. Scheuer had been frustrated by the lack of support his work received within the agency. "One of the things that I think is probably not very well appreciated is that, even within the agency, people thought we were nuts," Scheuer told Grey. Still, the CIA was tasked with disrupting terrorist networks abroad and, though Scheuer told Grey it was not intended to become a "policy of first choice," extraordinary rendition of suspects became one of the only options policymakers afforded the agency. According to Scheuer, when it was approved by the executive branch, the "CIA came back and said to the policy maker, where do you want to take them, the answer was--'that's your job.' And so," Scheuer recalled, "we developed this system of assisting countries, who want individuals who have either been charged with or convicted of crimes, to capture them overseas and bring them back to the particular country where they are wanted by the legal system."

Though that policy may have sounded reasonable, it was fraught with danger. That became apparent even before 9/11. In 1998, CIA agents took custody of a number of Egyptians who were arrested in Albania for allegedly plotting to blow up the U.S. embassy. Grey recounts that a total of five Egyptians of this "Tirana cell" were captured, interrogated by the CIA, and flown to Egypt. They included, according to Grey, Ahmed Saleh, who "was suspended from the ceiling and given electric shocks; he was later hanged for a conviction from a trial held in his absence." Another member of the Tirana cell was Ahmed al-Naggar, who, Grey recounts, "was kept in a room for thirty-five days with water up to his knees, and had electric shocks to his nipples and penis. He was later hanged without attending a trial for his alleged crime; his sentence of death had been pronounced before his arrival." Others had similar fates. These members of the Tirana cell may have been criminals, but they received only retribution, not justice, in Cairo, and the CIA's participation in their fates made a mockery of the rule of law in the United States. As bad as this was, it would get worse after 9/11.

Tortured to Death

The aim of the terrorist is to cause a nation to destroy itself. On their own, terrorists might kill hundreds, or even thousands, of people, but they usually are powerless to overthrow a society by force. Instead, they follow the plan laid out by Brazilian communist Carlos Marighella. In his Mini-Manual for Urban Guerrillas, Marighella argues that terrorists attack a society so that "the government has no alternative except to intensify its repression." Through the reaction against terror, Marighella observes, "the political situation is transformed into a military situation, in which the militarists appear more and more responsible for errors and violence."

After 9/11 a few sober voices emerged warning that the United States should not abandon its principles in order to pursue a war on terror and that to do so would be tantamount to a capitulation to terrorism. Others like Judge Richard Posner drowned out this sober advice, crying that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Just two months after 9/11, Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter advocated torturing those suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. "Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly 'Sept. 10'--living in a country that no longer exists," Alter wrote. And, he continued, we'll have to begin to start doing things that once were unthinkable: "we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical.... Nobody said this was going to be pretty."

Alter got his wish, and then some. As Marighella predicted, the government reacted to terrorism by expanding repressive policies. Supported by the highest offices in the U.S. government, the CIA vastly expanded the extraordinary rendition program and, in addition to the infamous holding pen at Guantanamo, set up a network of "black" prisons around the world. One of these was the now-notorious Abu Ghraib. There, at the facility once used by Saddam Hussein to torture prisoners, the CIA would preside over the death of an Iraqi suspect.

According to Grey, Manadel al-Jamadi "was suspected of involvement in a bomb attack that had destroyed the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad on October 27." That was in 2003. On November 4, a fleet of Humvees pulled up in front of the apartment building in which al-Jamadi lived. Breaking through the door, a Navy SEAL team violently subdued the man and roughly shoved him into the back of a Humvee. He was taken first to the Baghdad airport where, according to Grey, he "was punched, kicked, and struck by the SEALs at the camp, among other places in a tiny space known as the Romper Room."

Also present, according to Grey, were CIA interrogators. One of these, according to a Navy SEAL who was there, "pushed 'his arm up against the detainee's chest, pressing on him with all his weight.'" A CIA guard there heard an agency interrogator "threaten to 'barbecue' al-Jamadi if he didn't begin to talk." According to Grey, at this point a beaten al-Jamadi groaned, "'I'm dying, I'm dying,' to which the interrogator responded, 'You'll be wishing you were dying.'" He was then "body slammed" into another Humvee and whisked off to Abu Ghraib.

There, he was put into an orange jumpsuit and taken to a level of the prison known as Tier 1-Alpha, according to author Grey, "the wing of Abu Ghraib used by the OGA," an acronym meaning "other government agencies" and shorthand, usually, for the CIA. Though he was having difficulty breathing, CIA interrogator Mark Swanner ordered that the prisoner's wrists be cuffed to the wall behind him. "He could stand up but if his knees buckled, then he would be left hanging from the wall," Grey noted, describing the procedure as a form of torture known as a "Palestinian hanging."

While hung this way under the control of the CIA's Swanner, al-Jamadi died. An autopsy found that he died of "blunt force trauma to the torso complicated by compromised respiration." Later, according to Grey, two other medical examiners, Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Cyril Wright, looked at the autopsy results and concluded that the prisoner "died because of 'compromised respiration' caused by the combination of broken ribs and the painful position in which he was held." According to Dr. Baden, a forensic pathologist with the New York State Police, "asphyxia is what he died from--as in a crucifixion." In short, al-Jamadi was tortured to death by the new Torture, Inc.--the CIA.

Betrayal

There are far too many victims of the CIA's torture programs to cite here. Along with Abu Omar and Manadel al-Jamadi, some of the more notorious cases that have come to light include the kidnapping of Canadian computer technician Maher Arar from New York's JFK Airport and the kidnapping of German citizen Khaled el-Masri. In the first case, Arar was renditioned to Syria, the country of his birth, where he was held in a three-foot by six-foot jail cell for almost a year in the notorious "Palestine Branch" jail run by Syrian military intelligence and where he was beaten with a shredded electrical cable and threatened with a variety of other torture methods.

In the second case, el-Masri was kidnapped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia in December 2003. He was then renditioned to Afghanistan where, as el-Masri himself described it in the Los Angeles Times, "They told me that I was now in a country with no laws, and did I understand what that meant?" What it meant, to the CIA, was that the agency was no longer bound by U.S. law and could treat el-Masri and other captives any way they wished. As Grey writes, el-Masri "said he was roughed up in interrogations, beaten in Macedonia, photographed nude, and both injected with drugs and given suppositories against his will." When he began a hunger strike, he was force-fed through a tube in his nose. "I was dragged to the interrogation room, where a feeding tube was forced through my nose into my stomach. I became extremely ill, suffering the worst pain of my life," el-Masri recalled in his LA Times article.

Post 9/11, is this what America stands for: disregard for the rule of law, disdain for civilized behavior, and torture? Near the end of Ghost Plane, Grey concludes that torture is both ineffective and wrong. "It is wrong," he writes, "because it degrades our own societies." That is true, but Grey puts it much too mildly. The founding documents of this nation declare boldly that all men are created equal, that they have rights that governments may not subvert or destroy, and that the U.S. government, alone among nations, was founded to protect. That federal authorities now violate those rights with impunity abroad suggests that it will do so at home as well, given the chance. So writes Grey concerning extraordinary rendition. "It could happen to any citizen of either the West or the Orient," he says.

That is, unless the practice is stopped and those responsible for it are brought to justice. That likely can't happen until knowledge of the CIA's torture programs becomes widespread. And that is where Grey's Ghost Plane comes in. The book makes for chilling reading, but it's one that every American citizen should read carefully. If we remain blissfully unaware of what is done to others in our name as American citizens, it won't be long before it is done to us as well.