Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights
Trevor Paglen and A. C. Thompson
January 1, 2007
Icon Books Ltd
ISBN-10: 1840468300
ISBN-13: 978-1840468304
Torture Taxi does a good job of laying out the investigative reporting that went into discovering the CIA’s rendition flights that shuttled kidnapped terrorist suspects to foreign countries for detention, interrogation, and sometimes outright torture. The techniques used to discover the covert actions of the CIA were sometimes as simple as plane spotting, database mining, signature comparison and old fashioned door knocking.
There are plenty of hard facts; tail numbers from planes, front company details, fake identities, first-hand accounts of torture, redacted documents, and photographs given as supporting evidence. The book presents the history of the program, which was started in the mid ’90s, ramped up during the Clinton administration, then put on steroids after 9/11 by the Bush administration.
It was fascinating for me to read about plane spotting and how that led to discoveries of front companies, the locations of various black sites, cooperative governments, etc. For example, when a plane was grounded on the tarmac in Karachi, Pakistan, a Pakistani journalist Masood Anwar published the tail number of the innocuous white civilian aircraft. That tail number, N379P was assigned to the infamous Guantánamo Bay Express. The paper trail left by ownership, flight logs, and maintenance records of that plane would help reveal the inner workings of the program.
While the book lays out many of the details of how the CIA conducted covert, extraordinary renditions, those details don’t fully support the book’s final conclusion; the program has had “crucial and corrupting consequences” for Western society. Yes, they touch on the altered reality created in the lawless vacuum of the Afghani desert, home of some of the earliest CIA black sites and they briefly discuss the impact on CIA company towns like Smithfield, North Carolina, but by and large the meat and potatoes of the book is detailing the process of uncovering the way the CIA hides these operations in plain sight, not about the larger impact on society.
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