ACLU Lawsuit targets planner of CIA torture flights

by Indy.ie Ljubljana Correspondent Thu May 31, 2007 19:12

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking with Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson about their book Torture Taxi. Talk about the people who track these planes.

TREVOR PAGLEN: Well, it's an unusual community. It's a kind of hobbyist community. A lot of them don't necessarily have -- they don't do this for political reasons. It's a kind of curiosity. There's a kind of almost like an aesthetics to it, looking at a system and trying to decode how it works, and this is something that people do as a hobby.

A.C. THOMPSON: So one of the guys that we hung out with had a homemade radar system that he was tracking U-2 planes on, and so we went with him outside a military base in Northern California while he tracked in real-time U-2 planes as they flew through the air on test flights. I mean, that's the sort of thing that these people are doing. And so what we did is sort of adopted their techniques. 'Ok, so you know how to track planes. You know where they go. You know that even a CIA plane has to file a flight plan with the FAA. Let's use that information and figure out where these suspicious planes that we've linked to the CIA are going.'

AMY GOODMAN: Last year, when Democracy Now! producer Elizabeth Press and I went to Ireland, we interviewed an Irish activist who had been documenting and logging U.S. flights coming in and out of Shannon Airport in Ireland. Tim Hourigan of the Mid-West Alliance Against Military Aggression was among the first to document the secret use of Shannon by the United States for extraordinary rendition. This is an excerpt of what he had to say.

TIM HOURIGAN: The government was trying to cover up and minimalize everything that was going on at the airport, everybody saying that, you know, there's nothing secretive or furtive going on at the airport. It was denied at the highest level in this country. And then some people set up a peace camp and started, you know, showing photographs of what was going on, giving figures, registration numbers of aircraft. And the state wasn't particularly happy with that. Following a few actions, including the disarmament actions by Mary Kelly and the Catholic Workers, a high court injunction was sought to evict everyone in the peace camp and to prevent us from entering the grounds of the airport, where we had been monitoring before. It has had very little effect, because we just got a telescope, and we do it from, you know, a mile away.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think most people in Ireland know what's happening at Shannon Airport now?

TIM HOURIGAN: They didn't before, but they certainly do now. They know that it has been used, but they -- there's still more that's being covered up like the renditions you referred to. The jet involved in that, I have seen it at Shannon Airport and we have logged it a few times. And it's never been inspected at Shannon Airport. None of the military flights at Shannon Airport have been inspected. The particular jet has been -- has come through Shannon last year, the year before, going from the Middle East to the States. It's never been inspected.

more at
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/1342250

by Indy.ie Ljubljana Correspondent Thu May 31, 2007 19:10

In order to uncover the truth about these planes, Thompson later explained, “we were researching this as people who didn’t have intelligence sources, as people who didn’t have sources deep in the aviation business. We were trying to reverse engineer the program … so we gathered up all the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records and corporate paperwork that we could. Then we also networked with the planespotters — the sort of nerdy hobbyists who spend their time obsessing over the minutia and esoterica of aviation.”

more at
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/torture-taxi/