Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights

by Trevor Paglen and AC Thompson

Book Overview

A report on clandestine Central Intelligence Agency activities, including the maintenance of secret military bases with detention facilities, known as black sites, in Afghanistan and elsewhere....... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1740664922
• ISBN13: 9781740664929
• Release Date: January 2006
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Extraordinary rendition and irregular rendition and The Taxi

This book is dated already but it is a well written resource. The author had become skilled at tracking flights. Private front companies like the famous Air America that operated out of southeast Asia during the Vietnam war but it has all gotten way more sophisticated. A whole privet airline network of snatch and grab black bag type of dudes. Efficient money making and very "black". Some politicians state that waterboarding does not constitute torture. And that may be true however the agency can fly you someplace no one cares and dip you in a vat of acid. They can fly a guy any place including places where they want to torture guys for cash. The dark side of the war on terror. If you think the War on Terror is real and necessary then this is a brilliant capitalists secret response to jihad. Neat and tidy and we do not see anything bad. Apparently they sometimes pick up the wrong guy on the torture taxi. Use of front companies and even if I remember right the Boston Red Sox's plane to aid in torture is all recounted in this book. According to wikipida "Within days of his inauguration, President Obama signed an Executive Order opposing rendition torture and establishing a task force to provide recommendations about processes to prevent rendition torture." FYI it is 3/1/2010 as of the writing of this review Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program is still needed. Interesting.

Stunning.

Trevor Paglen and A. C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (Melville House, 2006) I can't remember the last time I read a general nonfiction book in the space of twenty-four hours; I'm not sure it's ever happened before. But I did it with this one (while at the same time blazing through a novel that was almost as good). And it's not because I know (if tangentially) one of the authors; it doesn't matter if you're my mom, if your book's unreadable, I'm not going to be able to read it. It's because Torture Taxi is a fast-paced, exceptionally well-written book. I'm something of an egalitarian when it comes to reading; I can read about subjects that I know nothing or care nothing about-- or even actively dislike (cf. review of Richard Bak's Yankees Baseball, a sport I loathe)-- as long as the information is presented in an interesting way. I knew Paglen was capable of this long before he put pen to paper, as I was a big fan of his musical project Noisegate back in the day. One often wonders whether artists are capable of crossing media. In this case, it worked like a charm. Torture Taxi, as the subtitle tells you, is a book about the CIA's Extraordinary Rendition program, a previously-secret initiative that was brought out into the open by regular folks around the globe who started wondering about the odd flight patterns of a certain group of planes. Using these, they tracked down ghost corporations, secret prisons, survivors of the program, and a host of scary, scary documents. This book, to be blunt, is a conspiracy theorist's most beautiful dream. I've never been a conspiracy theorist, but I've got to say that Paglen and his co-author, investigative journalist A. C. Thompson, make a very compelling-- and damning-- case that Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are only the tip of this polluted iceberg. They interview the survivors. They visit the sites. They quote, and sometimes show pictures of, the documents. The picture that emerges is not pretty. This is a book that seems to have gotten very little notice. (Noisegate's music didn't, either, and that's equally criminal.) I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this, but I'm now going to attempt to change that, Torture Taxi is going to be one of the books I start recommending to everyone within earshot. Will likely find its way onto my ten best reads of the year list. **** ½

To Live Outside the Law You Must be Honest

Paglen and Thompson have written an excellent exposition of the "extraordinary rendition" program currently extant in the US. While there are many other articles and books that deal with this new and perverse twist in American Executive Branch authority, this one is unique in it's detailed exposition of the grassroots international network of "plane spotters". These dedicated amateurs initially identified the involved aircraft (the "torture taxis") and their efforts ultimately lead to the public exposure of the program. A brief historical note places the program in context: it was begun during the Reagan Administration, continued and amplified under Clinton and reached it's zenith during the current Bush Administration. All evidence, the authors assert, suggests it is permanently with us. The litany of terrorist actions that lead to it's creation is briefly summarized. The argument of the book is as follows: The Executive Branch, under whose aegis this program falls, does not trouble to deny the existance of the program. Rather, it asserts that it's war making authority encompasses "necessary defensive measures" such as this one; these claims are simply preposterous infringements on the accepted legal standard. The mendacious justifications offered by John Yoo and his colleagues at the US Justice Department for this gross and self-evident breach of human rights and de facto abrogation of a plethora of applicable treaties renders the position of the US vis-a-vis our Western Allies and our role as a "model" for the "benighted" Second (former USSR) and Third World risible. Further, Justice's claims are so all-encompassing that they create for the Executive Branch the legal pretext for a variety of encroachments on civil liberties and our established system of governance which genuinely threaten the basis for our current Constitutional form of republican government. It would be reasonable to conclude that, as a result of precedents such as this program, when US civilians and military personnel are captured and tortured by our enemies, only a perverse, paralogical and cynical objection to their treatment can be proffered by Americans, given the standard successive US governments have set for their own official behavior. Complicity of a variety of "enlightened" EU governments exposes their own hypocritical stances on human rights. Their involvement further undermines Western moral credibility and promotes the "moral equivalence"/post-modernist arguments that frequently derail any attempt to establish standards for individual and nation-state behavior. The book could benefit from an index and a somewhat more thorough reference section. The occasional use of the "present historical" tense is annoying, as this adds a sensationalist tinge to the otherwise excellent reporting. However, these are truly minor quibbles. The book really soars in the "conclusion" section. The authors' condemnation of the program is best encapsulated in

A good overview (and nothing more)

The book is an easy read (though not very enjoyable given its subject matter) of how the current situation of numerous unlawful kidnappings of different countries citizens in the names of the US war on terror has come to pass and the potential consequences. The overall style is investigative reporting but this is no Woodward/Bernstein style opus because the writers have no important inside sources spilling the beans. Instead what you get is a good trail of all the historical evidence, how the position grew under prior US presidents but always with the ability to disclaim knowledge until "Dubya" proved to be the post 9/11 president who wanted to show hands on involvement, and a post 9/11 turf war which the FBI lost and the CIA under George Tenet has probably taken too far in the adverse consequences for that organisation and the US government. The book is heavy on facts (especially how the global hobby of plane spotting and flight tracking proved the undoing of and publicising of the CIA's secret programme) but poor on analysis. There is for example minimal understanding conveyed of how many governments (such as Sweden and Germany) that had been against the US war on Iraq proved such willing accomplices and without which the US rendition programme would never have worked. What is clear is that the programme has had minimal success with a great number of irrelevant or innocent operatives having been subject to different forms of imprisonment and torture and in turn the way the programme has been operated making it impossible to bring any proven cases to trial. The end victim is US credibility in many countries though the current US policy hold of not being weak on terrorism has probably obfuscated that immediate impact.

Shocking and poignant.

This book shows the story of the rendition of "people." One would think that when the subject of "rendition" or kidnapping by government would only concern Taliban or Iraqi insurgents or international terrorists. In many cases it does. In most cases however, it contains stories of people who were just living their lives normally like any other citizen. Some of them were and are innocent American citizens. Guilty of being Arabic or Muslim. I am a Christian, but fear that if the administration in power doesn't agree with my political ideals whether it be democrat or republican, they could render me. It really makes you think.