01Dec2005 Email this article.
The Dutch in the original article has been translated into English by Ben Kearney.
The CIA is now also using Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) as a transit point to or from the 'black sites', situated in countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Syria, but possibly countries in Europe as well. Following the lead of human rights organizations, veterans of the CIA are speaking out against torture, the American Senate is preparing legislation against torture (which the White House is opposing), and European Commissioner Frattini is threatening EU member states that have offered clandestine cover for CIA prisons with the temporary loss of their voting rights in the European Union. Europe has put up with a lot from the United States, but is now outraged. Just exactly what is going on, and how has it managed to get this far?

It was only a question of time; an airplane under contract to the CIA, ferrying people to countries where they will face torture, has landed in The Netherlands. A CIA torture plane was discovered on Thursday of last week at Schiphol. DaanSpeak reported previously on Sweden, where Muhammed Al-Zery was kidnapped by masked CIA agents with the help of the Swedish special police and then taken away by private jet, eventually ending up in Egypt where he was tortured through electrocution. The CIA has kidnapped people from other Western countries as well. Besides The Netherlands and Sweden, around 300 torture flights have been revealed in for instance Iceland, Spain and Germany. These countries are now taking action against these flights. It has even gotten to the point that the BushBlairBalkenende administration has become internally divided: Jack Straw, England's Foreign Secretary, has written Washington requesting an explanation, and The Netherlands, via Foreign Affairs Minister Bot, is threatening that it can have 'consequences' for the extension of Dutch participation in missions in Afghanistan.

Torture practices find their roots in the White House
American torture flights have attracted interest of late because of rumors that the U.S. is maintaining a network of secret torture prisons scattered throughout Europe, a network that was created in response to September 11th. As of yet the U.S. has made no comment on what The New Statesman is calling 'America's gulag', but has now promised to respond. The Council of Europe is going to investigate the information behind the rumors, which started at the beginning of last month after an article appeared in the Washington Post on these 'black sites' and after a statement was issued by Human Rights Watch. 'The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent', reported the Washington Post. The news in that article preceded the news that U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney now wants an exception made for the CIA within the proposed legislation against terrorism, already supported by ninety members of the Senate (nine were against). Colin Powell's former chief of staff said that Cheney 'provided the "philosophical guidance" and "flexibility" that led to the torture of detainees in U.S. facilities'. Former CIA director Stansfield Turner called Cheney the 'Vice President for Torture'.
Earlier journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that the orders to torture in Abu Ghraib came from the White House, specifically Donald Rumsfeld and his Copper Green program, which dictated the terms of the torture and sexual humiliation and was to a large degree carried out by Rumsfeld's Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone. Cambone and Rumsfeld are both part of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an organization that DaanSpeak has already written about. Some of the people who carried out the torture at Abu Ghraib have been convicted, but recently the former general in charge at Abu Ghraib substantiated the findings of Hersh by submitting that the orders for torture originated in the White House. Cheney's opposition to the proposed legislation denouncing torture is in line with the U.S.'s refusal to recognize the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and is also consistent with a draft report prepared by the Pentagon, which asserts that Bush can ignore all national and international laws against torture. The U.S. wants to back away from universally recognized standards and values and set its own course; the results are starting to become evident.



Examples of torture methods put to use
Different techniques are being applied to the victims tortured by and for the U.S. One of the torture methods being used is 'waterboarding', writes the Washington Post. This method makes the victim think that he is drowning. '"The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch. [...] According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess', reported ABC. 'Palestinian hanging' is another method that has been used, according to the Washington Post in another article. With this technique, 'a prisoner's arms are twisted behind his back and his wrists are chained five feet above the floor.'

The Guardian quotes a victim that was flown by the U.S. to Pakistan in order to be tortured there: 'One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.' Later the man was transported to Morocco: 'I suffered the razor treatment about once a month for the remaining time I was in Morocco, even after I'd agreed to confess to whatever they wanted to hear. It became like a routine. They'd come in, tie me up, spend maybe an hour doing it. They never spoke to me. Then they'd tip some kind of liquid on me - the burning was like grasping a hot coal. The cutting, that was one kind of pain. The burning, that was another.' During his detention it was explained to the man exactly what he should say in the courtroom.

'[Mamdouh] Habib, a former coffee shop manager from Sydney, was arrested in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border, a month after 9/11. He was handed over to US agents, who flew him to Cairo, where he was tortured for six months, according to his US lawyer, Professor Joe Margulies, of the MacArthur Justice Centre of the University of Chicago. Margulies says: “Mr Habib describes routine beatings. He was taken into a room and handcuffed and the room was gradually filled with water until the water was just beneath his chin. Can you imagine the terror of knowing you can't escape?” On another occasion, he was suspended from a wall. “His feet rested on a drum with a metal bar through it. And when they passed an electric current on the drum he got a jolt of electricity and he had to move his feet, and he was left suspended by his hands. And it went on until he fainted.” Under this interrogation, Margulies, says, Habib confessed to his involvement with al-Qaida and readily signed “every document they put in front of him”, wrote Stephen Grey in Le Monde diplomatique, in April of this year. 'British journalist Stephen Grey, who claims to have a list of the flight movements of CIA aircraft, says he has discovered 210 suspicious flights in England alone', according to Der Spiegel.

In Syria the Canadian engineer Maher Arar was beaten with electrical cables on the palms of his hands and soles of his feet, writes The New Statesman; 'He was not alone: from the cells around him, he heard the screams of those under torture. One prisoner was from Spain, another from Germany. [...] J Cofer Black, former head of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre, testified in late 2002 that there were at least 3,000 terrorist prisoners being held worldwide. Intelligence documents show the scale may be even greater.' It's not clear whether this concerns people who are being held prisoner in the black sites. About this specifically, it has been spoken of 'hundreds' of people: 'Hundreds of suspects are believed to have passed through the [black sites] system [...]'.

'A Nov. 18 ABC News report quoted former and current intelligence officers and supervisors as saying that the CIA has a list of acceptable interrogation methods, including soaking naked prisoners with water in 50-degree rooms and making them stand for 40 hours handcuffed and shackled to an eyebolt in the floor. ABC reported that these methods had been used on at least a dozen captured al Qaeda members.' In another article ABC quotes another victim of torture in Iraq: '"They took us to a cage — an animal cage that had lions in it within the Republican Palace," he said. "And they threatened us that if we did not confess, they would put us inside the cage with the lions in it. It scared me a lot when they got me close to the cage, and they threatened me. And they opened the door and they threatened that if I did not confess, that they were going to throw me inside the cage. And as the lion was coming closer, they would pull me back out and shut the door, and tell me, 'We will give you one more chance to confess.' And I would say, 'Confess to what?" [...] "I found the other prisoners who had come before me there in the line beside me mocking, in a way as to make it a mock execution," he said. "They all stood up, those of us who could stand up. They directed their weapons towards us. And they shot, shot towards our heads and chests. And when the shots sounded, some of us lost consciousness. Some started to cry. Some lost control of their bladders. And they were laughing the whole time."' The two men, Thahee Sabbar and Sherzad Khalid, have lodged a complaint against Donald Rumsfeld. A group of 160 lawyers assembled in Lawyers Against the War, aiming higher, have complained to President Bush.

The torture manuals of the U.S. and England were featured earlier in this DaanSpeak series. The Brits make use of R2I, short for Resistance to Interrogation. U.S. methods are founded on the KUBARK-handbook from 1963. 'Collected excerpts of this manual and of other manuals later recovered by the military espionage during the 60s, known as “Project X” were mixed to write a second “Bible” of the perfect torturer which was titled Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual -1993. The new manuals were largely used again in South America from 1983 to 1987', writes Arthur Lepic of VoltaireNet. The R2I manual has undergone a revision and is also being used by the Australian military.

People arbitrarily sold as prisoners to U.S.
Lawyers accuse the U.S.
Many of the prisoners who were handed over to the U.S. were not criminals, but were instead people who were arbitrarily plucked from the street and sold to the U.S. for a large sum of money. The men who were threatened with being thrown to the lions were vegetable and sugar merchants. Perhaps it is no surprise that of the 500 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, only nine people have been charged with a crime. '"Whenwe went to Pakistan the local people treated us like brothers and gave us good food and meat," said another detainee. But soon, he said, they were in prison in Pakistan where "we heard they sold us to the Pakistani authorities for $5,000 per person"', reported the Associated Press. The hefty rewards were advertised via loudspeakers and leaflets: 'Said one leaflet: "You can receive millions of dollars. ... This is enough to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life — pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people." Helicopters broadcast similar announcements over the Afghan mountains, enticing people to "Hand over the Arabs and feed your families for a lifetime," said Najeeb al-Nauimi, a former Qatar justice minister and leader of a group of Arab lawyers representing nearly 100 detainees.' Some Saudi prisoners were purchased back from Pakistan. '"If I had known that, I would have gone and bought my son back", said Khalid al-Odha, who started a group fighting to free 12 Kuwaiti detainees.'
'In Italy, a judge has issued warrants for the arrest of 19 CIA agents said to have been behind the kidnapping of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, an Islamist cleric dragged into a van near his home in Milan in February 2003. He was flown to Egypt for interrogation, and later told relatives that he had been tortured with electric shocks', wrote the Guardian. In the course of their operation, the CIA agents indulged in excessive luxury.

Torture fleet run by CIA front organizations
The Guardian wrote in September that the CIA is putting 26 planes into service with which to transport prisoners; meanwhile Dick Marty is subjecting 31 CIA airplanes to an investigation on behalf of the Council of Europe. It is possible that by deploying the fleet of torture planes the CIA is working together with the U.S. Navy's covert agency NELO. The airplane that landed in the Netherlands on Thursday is a De Havilland Dash 8-315B passenger plane with registration number N505LL and is property of the Path Corporation. Earlier DaanSpeak reported on two other airplanes that are being used by CIA front organizations to transport prisoners. One of them is also identified by Human Rights Watch in their statement, the Boeing 737 N313P (also registered as N4476S, wrote Wayne Madsen on November 24th). Imam Abu Omar (also known as Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr) was abducted in Milan in broad daylight and was flown out in a CIA airplane owned by Tepper Aviation, as reported in an article in Der Spiegel. Dante Strobino of the activist organization FIST makes reference to "Aero Contractors Ltd, a CIA torture air-taxi service". And yet another airplane, 'with identification number N196D, is registered to Devon Holding & Leasing Inc. of Lexington, N.C., a company identified by the New York Times as one of seven CIA-controlled shell corporations.' Of the CIA flights The Guardian writes: 'The aircraft and their crews are the successors to Air America, the CIA-owned airline that flew covert missions during the Vietnam war. Many of the aircraft are operated by a company called Aero Contractors, which was founded by a former chief pilot of Air America, and is based in a remote corner of an airfield at Smithfield, North Carolina.'
The headline on a Dutch website reads: 'The Netherlands also part of CIA network'. The article points to a list of CIA airplanes provided by airplane spotters, of which a portion is used to transport prisoners to torture chambers. The Spanish newspaper El Pais produced a similar list, notes Daily Kos in an extensive blog post entitled Tail Number Watch.

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Where does this out of control behavior come from? Divorced from every standard, detached from every value. In a previous DaanSpeak we looked at examples of this conduct, devoid of standards and values, in both The Netherlands and the United States. The cases of torture described in this DaanSpeak only add to the list of facts. The 'highest' authority is the source of the 'lowest' behavior, and notably enough, pleads all along for the highest of standards. Both President Bush and Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende love to promote their concept of standards and values. Both have carried out extensive campaigns in support of this agenda. Is there a relationship between their lofty words and their low deeds? Does it also work the other way around? It certainly seems to. Everyday people, against whom the Western authorities are now arming themselves by putting into place measures that control and restrict freedom, for example hit the streets to demonstrate for peace and against a war with Iraq. And in the documentary Rize by David LaChapelle, now playing in theaters, citizens of poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles can be seen striving to rise above poverty and gang violence. It seems as if the average man wants peace and harmony, but that he has to be persuaded to wage war through lies and deceit.

Part of the overall lie is the use of religion. Bush presents himself as a born-again Christian, yet in direct contradiction of Christian values proceeds to sow death and destruction. He does that/has done that not only as the president - as governor of Texas he broke the record for imposing the death penalty. In the meantime, a majority of Americans are convinced that Bush conned them into a war against Iraq with a pack of lies and his vice-president has assigned himself to the task of preventing torture from being banned. Hardly Christian. 'Who would Jesus torture?' could be a variant of the well-known bumper sticker 'Who would Jesus bomb?'. '[...] for the neoconservatives, religion was a myth, like the myth of America as a unique nation that they had promoted in the Cold War. Strauss had taught that these myths were necessary to give ordinary people meaning and purpose, and so ensure a stable society', says Adam Curtis in his BBC documentary series The Power of Nightmares about Leo Strauss, ideologue of the neoconservatives. Religion as a deep-rooted weapon in the battle of Divide and Conquer. On September 11th the U.S. was not attacked by 19 Muslims. As evidenced by the facts brought to the fore by the likes of scientists, technicians and ex-ministers, 9-11 was a false flag operation carried out in contract to and/or in cooperation with the White House, just like the false flag attacks in London on 7-7. The goal of both attacks was to criminalize Muslim society and thereby make possible the conquest of territory outside the West, as well as the imposition of measures inside the West designed to curb freedom.

In the eyes of those who have been declaring war of late, the lies and the deceit are a necessary evil: According to neoconservative ideologue Leo Strauss, it is acceptable to lie to the public (the so-called 'noble lie') for their own benefit, a vision which coincides with that of Skull & Bones, the secret society that George W. Bush belongs to. This secret society is an elite network set up with that objective in mind. It wants to survive and to dominate at any cost, and does so by way of a fascination with death and destruction and an total lack of respect for all who find themselves somewhere below their highest point of the pyramid. It is precisely these traits that we are once again seeing in the American government of today - a government that, in imitation of the pirate mentality evoked by the pirate emblem of Skull & Bones, has hijacked the American public and managed to demonstrate its parasitic lifestyle in the rest of the world as well. It is a way of life that is favorable only to the elite of the elite, and the results are becoming evident: more and more the White House is alienating itself from the rest of the world. This sentiment could change were the U.S. to once again fall victim to another attack. Because of this, all attention should be devoted toward preventing a third false flag operation like September 11th. A second September 11th could be an attack carried out by Israel, in contract to and at the same time against the U.S. (which happened before with Operation Cyanide). Iran could be blamed for the attack, and then the U.S. would attack Iran with a preemptive nuclear strike. Read about the coming war against Iran in this comprehensive series from DaanSpeak.


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