First Class to Hell and the CIA
Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, by Stephen Grey
Review by Tom Roughneen

Today’s headline was that “an Iranian diplomat showed off wounds on his feet yesterday, and said they were inflicted by drills during two months of detention in Iraq that included harsh interrogation by an American official.  The U.S. has denied any role in the capture of Jalal Sharafi.”  However, Stephen Grey’s timely 268 page account with 43 pages of footnotes, convincingly and subtly makes the important point that “renditions” or the “extrajudicial” kidnappings of terror suspects may be far from novel and the law can be parsed to rationalize them.  Now when a Muslim man claims that U.S. forces detained and tortured him, the American public is slightly more inclined to read the account.

No doubt as the Guantanamo detainees’ stories increasingly creep on to our front pages, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, will become increasingly prominent.  It succinctly and seamlessly follows the flight plans of CIA-leased planes that leave from Western countries and take Muslim men to locations that read like a “Who’s Who” of the State Department’s Country Reports of worst human rights abusers.  Flying the reader around the globe to unsavory places like the Syrian prison known as the “Palestine Branch,” then on to alleged torture chambers in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and of course, to Camp X-Ray in Cuba, the book is a tour de force.  By the end, Grey has laid-out sufficient facts along with the relevant legal regimes to highlight the pros and cons of the often ham-handed operations.

This is by no means an “easy-read.”  However, the investigative reporting is masterfully interwoven with understandable explanations of complex concepts of international law.  Through the combined use of suspense-building, as if all the CIA renditions were a single murder mystery side-by-side, with precise research and endnotes as if a Supreme Court legal brief on international law, this is a convincing indictment of U.S. operations.  To do so, Grey interviews soldiers, CIA pilots, operations officers, along with the mission planners and even White House officials who agreed to discuss aspects of the operations for the book. 

Rendition has a long history and there was even a Supreme Court decision in 1886 that ruled the manner in which a foreigner arrived in court was "of no moment."  That precedent remains in place to this day.  As a policy, however, Grey traced the increase in the use of renditions to 1992 when the first President Bush signed National Security Directive 77 that specified the “return of suspects by force may be effected without the cooperation of the host government.”  In 1995, two months after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 39.  It ordered that the return of terrorists in violation of U.S. law was “a matter of the highest priority.”

Nine-eleven changed the policy however.  Instead of rendition to face charges, the suspects were transported to foreign jails so that they could be interrogated for a potential--though not necessarily a plannedtrial.  Grey found only two exceptions to this change in policy.  In fact, the current President signed a Memorandum of Notification on September 17, 2001 that authorized the CIA to conduct renditions without any advance approval from the White House or DOJ.  A policy that had been an outgrowth of a “least worst” pre-9/11 compromise in fighting terrorists had originally been what one former CIA covert operative called “a ‘low-profile counterterrorist tool,’ but afterward became a ‘standard operating procedure, critical to the way the CIA wages its battle against Islamic extremism.’”  Ghost Plane provides a very credible and detailed account of how and why the policy changed the way it did.

It was the case of two Egyptian men arrested in Sweden and the work of local TV journalists and human rights activists there that led the Swedish government to release official reports about the arrests.  That led to the airport where the U.S. registered Gulfstream jet plane landed, secretly loaded the prisoners and then filed a flight plan to Cairo, Egypt.  Since the Egyptian authorities later released one of the two arrested men without filing charges against him, the events from that extraordinary rendition were able to be confirmed.  Upon release, although he was held in Egypt under house arrest and not free to talk, some details did emerge about his treatment.  More significantly, however, from one tail number of one U.S. plane, journalists followed a trail that led to an apparent front company for the CIA, based in Johnston County, North Carolina.  Located only a few miles from Fort Bragg, and the U.S. Special Operations Command, that company also leased other planes and soon the journalists were able to track both previous and ongoing CIA flights around the world using public FAA records and the Aircraft Communicating Addressing and Reporting System.  In the Swedish case, Egypt agreed not to use torture and to allow observers at any subsequent trial.  As to the torture, definitive proof may not be available but Swedish diplomats were barred from observing the one trial that did occur and which led to a 25 year jail sentence.

Stephen Grey’s knack is to find various headlines of U.S. involvement with questionable allies in the war on terror and to find out what really happened.  As to Abu Ghraib, Grey dug deeper and revealed what happened to the dead Iraqi General depicted in an ice-filled body bag with the MP soldiers.  In the end, although the military charged a Navy SEAL officer in that case, a court-martial acquitted him.  CIA lawyers attended and objected to certain evidence.  Although we know that America suddenly broke off its alliance with Uzbekistan, we did not know of the British diplomat that publicly complained about the prisoners the CIA brought to be tortured in that country’s jails and that he ultimately lost his job.  Among other news stories, Ghost Plane relates the facts surrounding the Italian and German indictments of U.S. operatives and why the cases have merit, even if there are bigger picture diplomatic questions surrounding the controversy.  

Not only does this book ask the right questions, it also offers some solutions to the dilemma of separating terrorists from law-abiding citizens.  Quoting former CIA agent Michael Scheuer, “a detainee capture is a technical success but in a strategic sense we are losing, and one of the main reasons is because of our support for dictatorships in the Muslim world.”  Practically-speaking, two of Grey’s suggestions are well worth pursuing.  The first is that should harsh interrogation be necessary, the best way to determine the reliability of the information is to conduct the operation without the shroud of “roguish allies.”  The other problem is that if the U.S. and European countries do not have a legal structure that directly addresses international arrests and rendition, one needs to be created that is “acknowledged publicly, … [is] subject to outside inspection, and exist[s] under the rule of law.”  Secret arrests of innocent men and reports of subsequent and pointless torture outweigh the benefits of convicting those with blood on their hands.  Misdeeds that undercut the verdicts of the guilty would be an unacceptable tragedy heaped upon the tragedies of the lives lost at Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, on 9/11 and elsewhere.