NORTH CAROLINA
STOP TORTURE
NOW
PO Box 50345
Raleigh, NC 27650
e-mail via:
contact AT ncstoptorturenow.net
(919) 834-4478
(evenings, or messages during business hours)
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FOR THE PRESS
Scorecard on Torture Press Conference
Weaving a Net of Accountability Conference
Federal legislation we support
CIA report implicates Smithfield company
Transparency, Accountability and Restitution: Our Views
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Scorecard on Torture:
The Obama Administration's First Year
The Independent reprinted most of the Scorecard on Torture: The Obama Administration's First Year North Carolina Stop Torture Now (NCSTN) released during a February 2 press conference, where the group also announced new efforts to demand accountability for those who planned and piloted illegal flights of prisoners to secret torture facilities.
Christina Cowger, NCSTN Coordinator noted in her comments that our organization's disappointment with the current administration’s first year of actions on torture " ... in no way suggests that we’re somehow attempting to exonerate the previous administration. We are not trying to argue that current top officials are somehow mainly responsible for violations of international and national law."
"On the contrary – we are most disappointed with our current government precisely for failing to hold the previous administration accountable for barbaric and systematic use of torture," Cowger said.
The press conference followed on the heels of the Center for Constitutional Rights' announcement of their appeal of Maher Arar's complaint against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to the U.S. Supreme Court. Arar is the survivor of a Canadian-American conspiracy to disappear him to Syrian torture chambers aboard a CIA-chartered aircraft, such as operated by Aero Contractors. Concurrent filing with the high court, the Center for Constitutional Rights called for citizens to demand that Attorney General Eric Holder to stop defending the Bush administration's wrongs.
Nearly one year after President Obama announced an end to U.S. torture policy and a commitment to shutter secret detention centers run by the CIA, Harper's reporter Scott Horton revealed that Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) continues to operate a black site less than one mile from the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and may have murdered three captives there during 2006.
Guantánamo Bay is yet home to 110 captives that a Justice Department task force has cleared for release. Many of these men were sold into captivity by Afghani warlords or Pakistani informants. Some of these men and many others were disappeared with the help of Aero Contractors' flyers.
Reverend Tom Rhodes, minister of the congregation that has hosted NCSTN for more than four years, opened the press conference. Other featured speakers included Sarah Preston, Legislative Director, ACLU of North Carolina; and Chuck Fager, Director of the Quaker House, in Fayetteville near the Ft. Bragg headquarters of JSOC.
Cowger urged "North Carolinians to contact Attorney General Holder and ask that Maher Arar be issued a public apology, removed from the Terror Watch List, and receive compensation ... " from the U.S., as Canada has already provided.
Cowger also briefly revisited the history of our persistent, multifaceted, but -- so far largely fruitless -- struggle to convince elected representatives and community leaders of their responsibility to guard and promote our national security and integrity.
Accordingly, we are launching an effort to achieve accountability from the ground up.
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NORTH CAROLINA STOP TORTURE NOW (NCSTN) is a grassroots coalition of individuals committed to ending torture by first working against U.S. sponsorship and perpetration, and most specifically, investigating and ending the practice of extraordinary rendition.
Extraordinary rendition is a sanitized phrase that disguises the kidnap, enforced disappearance, detention and torture of individuals alleged to be enemies of the United States, including those guilty of nothing other than being misidentified.
Some of these captives were or are being transferred to the custody of third nations, such as Libya, Morocco, Syria and Egypt -- based on empty promises they would not be tortured.
Others were or are being interrogated directly by the CIA, using cruel, inhumane, torturous and counter-productive techniques at black site prisons in Eastern Europe, or in U.S.-run detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, shielded from monitoring by human rights organizations such as the International Red Cross.
Captives have included British, Canadian and German citizens, as well as refugees and asylum seekers.
One of the private companies linked to the extraordinary rendition program is Aero Contractors, Ltd., which is headquartered at a large hangar the Johnston County Airport near Smithfield, NC.
We are particularly concerned that state and local government officials and individual citizens recognize their own complicity in the extraordinary rendition program and take prompt steps to provide restorative justice to victims and survivors, to air a full account of human rights violations, and to demand top-down accountability for the authors and perpetrators.
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SAVE THE DATES: April 8-10, 2010
Weaving a Net of Accountability: Taking on extraordinary rendition at the state and regional level
NCSTN joins the Duke Human Rights Center (at Duke University), and the University of North Carolina School of Law Immigration & Human Rights Policy Clinic in convening a coalition of human rights, activist, legal and professional groups to coordinate a push for accountability for extraordinary rendition at the state and regional level.
In this case, accountability means:
(1) Creating a detailed and broadly available public record of North Carolina's state and local involvement in extraordinary rendition;
(2) Building alliances at the state, national and international level to push for accountability; and
(3) Working to prevent the continued use of state and local infrastructure for programs such as torture and extraordinary rendition through recommendations and new laws implemented at the local and state level.
To achieve these goals, we are organizing a conference at Duke University, April 8-10.
The conference will gather key international, national, and local activists, experts and journalists. Participating will be representatives from religious, legal, psychological, state, ethical, human rights, academic and advocacy groups.
A key goal of the conference is to organize a Commission of Inquiry for North Carolina, – composed of state, national and international public figures and experts – tasked to realize the goals described above.
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We ask Members of Congress to co-sponsor or otherwise support:
H.R. 984 – The State Secret Protection Act of 2009 (co-sponsored by Reps. David Price and Mel Watt);
H.R. 893 - American Anti-Torture Act of 2009;
H.R. 591 – The Interrogation and Detention Reform Act, sponsored by Rep. David Price, (co-sponsored by Reps. Brad Miller and Mel Watt);
S. 417 – State Secrets Protection Act; and
S. 147 – Lawful Interrogation and Detention Act.
Rep. Heath Shuler has expressed to one of his constituents his concern about the CIA's use of torture and extraordinary rendition.
He writes: "Our Constitution and laws apply to all Americans, and to all branches of government. They may not be ignored and are not open to imaginative reinterpretations."
And, also notes: "I am deeply troubled by the CIA's use of highly controversial interrogation techniques. Such treatment does not comply with U.S. statutes and treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and the 1949 Geneva Conventions."
On March 10,2009 Representatives Paul Luebke, Earl Jones and Pricey Harrison sent Reps. Miller, Price, Watt and Butterfield a letter urging each to follow-up on Attorney General Cooper's and Congressman Watt's request for an FBI investigation of Aero Contractors.
***
CIA report implicates Smithfield
company in torture cases
A Smithfield-based contractor for the CIA is implicated in the al-Nashiri torture case described in the long-anticipated CIA Inspector General’s report (courtesy, ACLU) released August 24, 2009.
According to the report, the CIA used mock executions to terrorize detainees and threatened detainees with pistols and electric drills.
Newsweek reported: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri’s interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. “The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up,” said one of the sources.
“The role of Aero Contractors in providing planes, pilots, maintenance, and crews for torture missions must be investigated,” said Josh McIntyre, spokesperson for NC Stop Torture Now. “Whether detainees are guilty or innocent, threatening them with power drills is appalling and illegal. By ‘driving the getaway car,’ Aero has been a co-conspirator in horrendous abuses of human rights.”
A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with “imminent death.” North Carolina Stop Torture Now believes that Aero Contractors’ conduct may be part of a criminal conspiracy partially planned and acted upon within the State of North Carolina, and should be subject to prosecution by the State for criminal conspiracy.
Later the same day, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed federal prosecutor John Durham (BBC report) as a special prosecutor to investigate claims of detainee abuse. However, analysts expect (Washington Post) the attorney general to reject or stifle a broad inquiry that could result in possible prosecutions of Justice Department lawyers in the Bush years as well as cabinet officers who developed counter-terrorism policy, and instead to focus on what CIA Director Leon Panetta characterized as "behavior, however rare, that went beyond the formal guidelines ... "
Holder noted in a statement explaining his decision that: " ... the information known to me warrants opening a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations," (emphasis added).
According to U.K.-based journalist Stephen Grey, author of the book Ghost Plane, an Aero Contractors plane was involved in the extraordinary rendition of al-Nashiri. This plane was the Gulfstream jet N379P, the notorious “Guantanamo Express,” which was based at Aero’s headquarters in Smithfield at that time.
Read NCSTN's entire media advisory on the release of the Inspector General's Report.
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Updated 07 February2010, JMcI
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