Black Sites or Red Herring?

Is news of black sites in Eastern Europe nothing more than a smoke screen?

Ever since Dana Priest's article in the Washington Post entitled CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons, rumors have been rife about the existence of these so-called "black sites" in Europe. Consequently, speculation has centered on Poland and Romania, both of whom immediately denied the allegations. Meanwhile, the European Commission has launched an investigation on the possible existence of secret CIA prisons, both within members states and those countries hoping to join the EU in the near future. Yet to what extent is all this government activity and media speculation nothing more than a diversion from the real issues at hand?

The story of secret prisons is actually nothing new. Almost from the very beginning of the so-called "war on terror" in 2001, pundits in the US have been discussing the "merits" of torture. Most agree that the US should not torture prisoners, but send them to other countries where torture is practiced, such as Turkey, the Philippines, Morocco, or Israel. The most progressive of these pundits would only go so far as to allow torture "if there is someone in another branch of our government who works in dark operations in intelligence and they want to close the door and let that kind of person try to find out some things [...] maybe that's a half an hour we can live with."

The fact that the US government condones torture is well known and well documented. This was made quite clear in the summer of 2004 when a classified memoranda from both the Defense Department and the Justice Department were leaked. These documents concluded "that certain acts may be cruel, inhumane or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within United States Code Section 2340A's proscription against torture."

In essence, the White House's ultimate strategy for the war on terror is to try and get rid of terrorism by terrorist means. From their dismissive attitude towards the Geneva Convention to their aggressive attempts to redefine the boundaries of torture, America's policy of torture interrogation is one based on the ticking-bomb theory, that is, if they think they could save a life or lives that are in imminent danger then torture is permitted. The only problem is that the US feels it's constantly in imminent danger.

CIA: Central Intelligence Airways

Just as worrying than the possible existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe, however, is the practice known as "extraordinary rendition". Extraordinary rendition is the secretive, extra-judicial transfer of detainees to foreign governments for interrogation, usually because some foreign governments are willing to use harsh interrogation techniques, including torture, which would not be legal in the US.

The problem with extraordinary rendition is not only are persons (many of whom may be innocent of any crime) being secretively transported to another country to face possible torture, but in most cases these so-called "transfers" represent the abduction of individuals from a foreign country -- something which is illegal under international law. As one former CIA pilot recalls, they never used the word rendition; "we used to call them 'snatches,'" he said. Perhaps the most famous case of extraordinary rendition (Uncle Sam und die "Snatch Option" des Präsidenten), and one which pre-dates the war on terror, is that of Mordecai Vanunu ("Richtet den Blick auf Israels Atomwaffen").

As a result, the main point of focus for many over the past few years has not been the location of black sites themselves, but what has come to be known as the "torture plane". The torture plane is a Gulfstream V that acquired the nickname "The Guantanamo Bay Express" because it was used in the transport of Al Qaeda suspects from locations in Europe and the Middle East (Gulfstream V von Globalsecurity.org - For over a year, the webmaster hasn't been aware that the site has been hacked and information on extraordinary rendition and The Guantanamo Bay Express neatly inserted. As of the time of writing this article, the hacked web page is still online). This plane is so well known that Dana Priest, the same author of the article on secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, had written about it in late 2004 and aptly entitled her piece Jet Is an Open Secret in Terror War.

The first public mention of the Gulfstream appeared six weeks after September 11, 2001, when a Pakistani newspaper reported that Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a 27-year-old microbiology student at Karachi University, had been spirited aboard the plane at Karachi's airport by Pakistani security officers in the early hours of October 23, 2001. There is no information about where he was taken. Pakistani officials said later that Mohammed, a Yemeni national, was believed by the US to belong to Al Qaeda and to have information about the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

In Europe, the plane first gained wide attention in Sweden. In December 2001 the US government requested Swedish officials detain two Egyptian born men. After the men were detained, they were secretly flown aboard the Gulfstream to Egypt where they claimed they were drugged by US agents and tortured with electric shocks. Sweden is investigating the allegations.

For the past couple of years, an informal and international network of "plane spotters," hobbyists who log the comings and goings of specific aircraft around the world, have posted on the Internet photographs of the Gulfstream in various locations (www.airliners.net, www.planespotters.net, www.jetphotos.net, www.jetspotter.com) It is the movement of this and other CIA planes which has led some to suspect the existence of secret CIA prisons in certain European countries.

Aside from this, there are some claims that the Gulfstream plane was not only used for transporting terrorist suspects to black sites, but was itself used as a torture chamber flying high in the sky. As Priest mentions in her article on the black sites, an early idea was to run prison ships in international waters. This idea was rejected, however, because of security and logistic reasons. On the other hand, using a plane to torture suspects while in mid-air and then return them to a black site or other facility is seen by some as not a far-fetched alternative.

In addition the the sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, the CIA owns and operates an entire fleet of aircraft. The fleet includes a World War II-era DC-3 as well as workhorse Hercules transport planes and Spanish-built aircraft that can drop into tight airstrips. The flagship of the fleet is a 737 Boeing Business Jet.

The CIA has a long history of secretly owning airlines. Starting in the 1950s the agency began building up a large network of airlines that eventually included about 200 planes and nearly 20,000 employees, making the agency one of the world's largest airline operators at the time. Among the CIA operated airlines were Air America, Air Asia, Evergreen Aviation, and Intermountain Aviation. Aero Contractors, Pegasus Technologies, and Tepper Aviation are presently part of the CIA's secret air service. In fact, Aero Contractors is a major domestic hub of the CIA's secret air service and appears to be the direct descendant of Air America.

Since 2001, the CIA has rapidly expanded its air operations. An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former CIA officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

For example, the 737 is not actually owned by the CIA. It is owned by a CIA shell company, Keeler and Tate Management, LLC. As for the infamous Gulfstream, the CIA and other government agencies leased the plane and used it over 300 times to pick up detainees around the world and then secretly deliver them to countries including Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan -- countries which have poor human rights records and practice torture in their jails.

At times, the CIA has to play a "shell game" in order to try and keep its secret from getting out to a wider public. This entails selling a plane from one government front company to another. Thus, when the Sunday Times of London, which claimed to have obtained the Gulfstream's flight logs, reported in November 2004 (Outsourcen der peinlichen Befragung) that the US government was secretly leasing the jet and that it had flown to at least 49 destinations outside the US, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, other US military bases, as well as airports in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan, two days later Premier Executive Transport (one of the shell companies) sold the Gulfstream to Bayard Foreign Marketing (another shell company).

What is worrying about all this is not only the extent to which the CIA operates clandestine flights, but the fact that these flights have been making regular stopovers in Europe. The CIA's 737 was photographed last year both in Portugal as well as in Spain. Indeed, in the case of the latter, the date it was spotted and photographed was on March 12, 2004, one day after the Madrid bombings. Meanwhile, the Gulfstream was photographed at Ruzyne in the Czech Republic, and in Hungary a plane belonging to Devon Holding and Leasing Inc (another CIA front company) landed at Ferihegy, Budapest, on October 3, 2005, and then left the following day.

Ironically, the EU's action of now looking into these flights comes a little late, as do the actions of individual member states; knowledge of these flights have been available for quite some time on the Internet, and last year there were many news reports of them as well. Whether or not these flights were connected to secret CIA prisons within Europe or not is beside the point. According to international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace. The question is: were EU member states willing accomplices in the US policy of torture interrogation by simply looking away when a known CIA torture plane landed to either refuel or pick up an alleged terrorist suspect?

Media Misconceptions

It is interesting to see in retrospect how Dana Priest's article quickly turned into something much bigger than originally reported. For instance, only one site was initially mentioned; the report cited US and foreign officials as saying the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaeda captives "in a Soviet-era compound somewhere in Eastern Europe".

Soon, however, the mass media was reporting that both Poland and Romania were possible black site locations. However, according to the CIA World Factbook neither Poland nor Romania are in Eastern Europe. The former is considered part of Central Europe (along with Switzerland, Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) while the latter belongs to Southeastern Europe. Eastern Europe are countries such as the Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

Apart from confusion over the geographical location of Eastern Europe, it is the movements of the CIA planes that led Human Rights Watch (HRW) to suspect that black sites existed in Poland and Romania. According to an indymedia report, "a Boeing 737 'leased' by the CIA to transport prisoners departed from Kabul, Afghanistan, and made stops at remote airfields in POLAND and ROMANIA before continuing on to Morocco and then to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to HRW. So POLAND and ROMANIA are two of the several Eastern European countries earlier reports only alluded to."

This jump in reasoning was also practiced by more seasoned outlets, such as the BBC, where it was claimed that the "CIA transported terror suspects captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania." No further details were forthcoming of whether these transports were merely stopovers, to drop off their human cargo, or to pick up more along the way.

As already mentioned, CIA planes had made a number of stops throughout Europe over the years, either to refuel or to pick up alleged suspects. Often, these planes fly empty when it is on its way to pick up suspects in Asia or the Middle East. First, it stops to pick up a CIA team in the US, as Scott Shane explains:

If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.

This may help explain the landing in Budapest on October 3rd of this year.

The fact that a CIA plane simply lands in a country is not an indication that a secret CIA prison exists at that location. If so, one can then conclude that Europe is full of black sites, in countries such as Sweden, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Spain, Iceland, and a host of other EU member states.

Finally, one has to seriously consider what is at stake for hosting a secret CIA prison. For all EU member states torture contravenes their individual constitutions as well as EU law. Thus, political leaders and heads of the intelligence services would be running a great risk if exposed. In some countries, such as Hungary, any such activity requires the approval of Parliament, which is why sending troops to Iraq was such a frustrating experience for the government.

All this is not to say that secret CIA prisons don't exist within the EU. Instead, media speculation over where the black sites are seem to be covering up the real issue at hand, which is the fact that some EU member states are already guilty of aiding and abetting the US in its use of torture, an act which contravenes the UN Convention Against Torture. In other words, regardless of whether a country actually has a secret CIA prison on its soil or not, the fact that they had allowed a torture plane to land, refuel, and then take off again from their territory can be considered a crime. Indeed, in some cases such co-operation contravenes local laws, as in Sweden, where it is illegal to deport anyone who might face torture or the death penalty.

Thus, as the BBC duly noted, governments are reluctant to talk about the issue of secret CIA prisons, giving the impression that there is something to hide. This should not come as much of a surprise, for although governments may not be hiding a black site, they are nevertheless trying to conceal their guilt in being an accomplice to extraordinary rendition.

Smoke Screen

The question as to why the story of the secret CIA prisons have made such a massive media impact remains. One reason could be that the culmination of stories related to CIA flights to Europe and extraordinary rendition have begun to make themselves felt. Dana Priest's report, therefore, was timely in that it enabled some European leaders to divert attention toward a "treasure hunt" for black sites, something which may very well not exist in Europe. At the same time, the true impact of CIA flights is somewhat lessened. As one leading Hungarian newspaper recently reported, CIA planes come and go in Hungary all the time. The underlying message to this is clear: flights are not important, it's whether a secret CIA prison exists or not.

Other possible reasons for the enormous interest in Dana Priest's article have to do with American politics. Some see it as a way to discredit the media as being overly speculative. The war of words in the US has increased somewhat as Vice President Dick Cheney recently fought back against those who maintain that the White House intentionally misled the American public in its case for war against Iraq. This, in turn, all has to do with mid-term elections in the US next year, with the campaigning on both sides already heating up.

By the same token, some see the issue as a sophisticated way for the White House to divert attention from President Bush's disastrous domestic policy, namely the lame response to Hurricane Katrina and the high price of oil. Since torture is not considered abhorrent in the US by everyone, especially when put within the framework of the war on terror, the negative fallout over secret CIA prisons is considered minimal.

In the end, aside from the existence of CIA flights and secret prisons, of ultimate concern is how the US blatantly ignores international law. America's contempt for global treaties and human rights makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the Bush administration to claim the moral high ground in its war on terror. Moreover, it demonstrates the true extent of the global police state we now all live under. Unfortunately, governments in Europe -- whose duty is to serve and protect European citizens -- has not only failed in its obligations, but in some cases have become partners in crime.