Making Torture Possible

June 21, 2007 by Maya Harris, Daily Journal

How much money would it take to persuade you to participate in the physical abuse of another human being? Would your conscience rest easier if you knew your role was limited to transporting the unsuspecting victim to the location where unimaginable pain would be inflicted on his body?
     
Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. is a company that specializes in providing high-priced, private flight services to exclusive clients. A household name in the aviation industry, Jeppesen can smooth out the departure, arrival and landing complications that sometimes make flying in and out of exotic locations difficult.

It's no wonder the CIA would seek such corporate services. According to a former Jeppesen employee, who recounted the words of a senior Jeppesen executive in a recently published article: "We [Jeppesen] do all of the extraordinary rendition flights - you know, the torture flights." The executive continued, "It certainly pays well. [The CIA] spare no expense. They have absolutely no worry about costs."

Cost should be the least of our worries when it comes to torture. That's why the American Civil Liberties Union has sued Jeppesen for its alleged participation in the U.S. government's "extraordinary rendition" program: an illegal and immoral program that transports terror suspects to countries where the whole world knows that detainees are routinely tortured and abused.
     
It has been estimated that at least 150 foreign nationals have been victims of the CIA's rendition program in the past few years. The CIA has transported foreign nationals to detention and interrogation facilities in countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Afghanistan and Morocco: places where, according to the U.S. State Department and other sources, the use of torture is "routine." Indeed, in the words of former CIA agent Robert Baer: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear, never to see them again, you send them to Egypt."
     
To help facilitate transportation of these detainees, the CIA has sought the assistance of U.S.-based corporations such as Jeppesen. These companies provide the aircraft, flight crews and logistical support necessary for hundreds of international flights, all in return for undisclosed fees.
     
Our lawsuit, Binyam Mohamed v. Jeppsen Dataplan, Inc., charges that Jeppesen has been a key provider of critical support services for at least 15 aircraft that made a total of 70 rendition flights. These ranged from preparing flight plans and furnishing services such as route and weather planning, to fueling, maintenance, customs clearance and ground transportation.

Without these support services, the CIA's rendition flights literally could not have gotten off the ground. Equally important, Jeppesen's alleged role as the coordinator for virtually all public and private third parties has permitted the CIA to conduct these illegal torture activities below the radar of public scrutiny.
     
We brought the lawsuit under the Alien Tort Statute, 28 U.S.C. Section 1350, which was passed by Congress in 1789 for the express purpose of providing foreign nationals access to American courts to bring claims for violations of international law. Through this statute, corporations have been held accountable when they have knowingly participated in human-rights abuses, such as forced labor or summary execution. The statute recognizes international norms accepted among civilized nations, such as the prohibition against torture, a practice that is universally condemned.
     
"Extraordinary rendition" violates, among other things, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment. The U.S. ratified this convention in 1992 and Congress has made clear that it is our government's policy not to "expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States."
     
Notwithstanding this, the rendition flights continue, leaving a trail of human wreckage in their jet stream.
     
Abducted in 2002 by men dressed in black and wearing masks, Binyam Mohamed was blindfolded, shackled and strapped to the seat of a plane that flew him from Pakistan to Morocco. There, he was secretly detained for more than a year. While in captivity, Mohamed's interrogators routinely beat him, breaking his bones and sending him into unconsciousness. During one horrific incident, his genitals were cut 20 to 30 times and hot, stinging liquid was poured into the open wounds.
     
About 18 months later, Mr. Mohamed was blindfolded once again and this time flown to a U.S. detention facility known as the "Dark Prison" in Kabul, Afghanistan. His captors repeatedly banged his head against a wall until he began to bleed, hung him from a pole in his cell, and blasted his cell with the loud recorded screams of women and children. Eventually, Mr. Mohamed was flown to the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he remains today.
     
Forty-year-old Italian citizen Abou Elkassim Britel suffered a similar fate when he was handcuffed, blindfolded, dressed in a diaper and flown from Pakistan to Morocco. Upon arrival, Britel was held incommunicado for eight months and subjected to brutal forms of physical and psychological torture. By the time he was released without any explanation or any charges brought against him, he suffered from dizziness and chronic diarrhea. His left eye and ear had been permanently damaged and large portions of his skin had turned black and blue; hair no longer grew in these areas.
     
On his way home to Italy, Britel was arrested by Moroccan authorities and then tried and convicted under the most questionable of circumstances. A six-year investigation into his suspected involvement in terrorist activities led an examining judge in Italy to dismiss the prosecution's case against Britel in September 2006, finding a complete lack of evidence. Eighty-seven members of the Italian Parliament have petitioned the president of Morocco to exonerate and release Britel and immediately return him to his home in Italy. Today, he remains imprisoned in Morocco.
     
Forty-five year old Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian citizen, was living in Sweden and awaiting a determination on his family's political asylum application when he was secretly apprehended by Swedish Security Police and handed over to CIA agents dressed in dark hoods. After stripping him, inserting suppositories into his rectum, and fitting him with a diaper and blindfold, Agiza was loaded onto an aircraft and returned to Egypt. Once there, he was held in solitary confinement in a tiny prison cell without windows, heat or light. He was interrogated, beaten, and strapped naked to a wet mattress where electrodes were applied to his ear lobes, nipples, and genitals and electric current was applied.
     
Corporations like Jeppesen don't turn on the electricity that ran through Agiza's body, inflict the beatings suffered by Britel, or wield the knife that cut into Mohamed's genitalia. Yet their alleged participation in the CIA rendition program makes it possible for these and other individuals to be subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
     
"Making Every Mission Possible": that's Jeppesen's motto. But some missions should never be accomplished, no matter the price.
      
     
Maya Harris is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.