OF all the dreadful novelties to which we have accustomed ourselves after Sept. 10, 2001, none is more grotesque than our continuing national debate over torture's moral and legal legitimacy.
The existence of a clandestine network of CIA prisons where suspected Al Qaeda terrorists and other alleged Islamic militants are held and tortured to obtain information first was revealed by the Washington Post's Dana Priest in a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning reports. Ron Suskind's excellent account of the war on terror, "The One Percent Doctrine," sketched in further insights. British journalist Stephen Grey now builds on that work in "Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program." His account is an impressively detailed investigation that includes original reporting, public documents and a rather remarkable number of on-the-record interviews.
The title describes the fleet of executive jets the United States' intelligence agency has used to ferry captured Islamic militants secretly around the world. Some have gone to the CIA's own "black site" facilities. Many more have gone to prisons in the Middle East and Central Asia, where repressive foreign governments, including the Assad regime in Syria, have been all too happy to torture them on the Americans' behalf. This process is known as "extraordinary rendition," and one of the services Grey performs in this dossier-like volume is to chart the practice's origins during the Clinton administration. In those days, the White House was at pains to make sure that prisoners were sent to countries only where they were wanted on what passed for the local equivalent of a valid warrant.
Even then, though, the intelligence professionals were nervous about the legality and utility of the process. Michael Scheuer was in charge of the CIA's effort to fight Osama bin Laden in those years, and he told Grey, "The practice of capturing people and taking them to third countries arose because the executive branch assigned to us the task of dismantling and disrupting and detaining terrorist cells and terrorist individuals. And basically, when the CIA came back and said to the policy maker, where do you want to take them, the answer was -- 'that's your job.' "
Thus, extraordinary rendition was born and, after 9/11, Bush's administration embraced it with a vengeance. While Grey's account of the Bush administration's program of secret prisons and institutionalized torture is rich in detail and more clearly sourced than many previous accounts, most of this material is essentially fascinating infill material connected with sensational revelations already broadly known, particularly through Priest's and Suskind's reporting.
