Amazing news story: The Guardian reports on a remarkable case of private contractors who flew American Terror War captives to various sites around the world to be tortured now coming to blows in court over a grubby dispute over expenses. Unbelievable that the details were allowed to come out in a routine civil case for unpaid invoices.
The mass of invoices, receipts, contracts and email correspondence – submitted as evidence to a court in upstate New York – provides a unique glimpse into a world in which the "war on terror" became just another charter opportunity for American businesses.
They reveal how a single plane, Richmor's N85VM, ferried dozens of captives -- seized and held in secret, without charges, without representation, outside any legal process, even the "laws of war" -- to grim fates in the far-flung gulag:
Over the next three years, this plane flew at least 55 missions for the US government, to Guantánamo Bay, Kabul, where the CIA ran the notorious "Salt Pit" prison; Bangkok, where Abu Zubaydah was first taken and used as a guinea pig for "enhanced interrogation techniques"; Rabat, where prisoners were kept incommunicado and tortured by Moroccan agents who passed information to the US and Britain; and Bucharest, one of the European secret jail sites.
Some of the most chilling aspects of the case concern the "human cargo" the profiteers were shipping for the torture bosses back in Washington. Not only did they willingly transport men who had been tormented, tied up, drugged and humiliated, they referred to the victims by the truly Orwellian term, "invitees."
What to do in the face of this grim reality? Many things; but as a general rule, I come back to the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, voiced by one of the characters in his novel on the theme of moral complicity with a system given over to pervasive evil:
"It impossible that evil should not come into the world; but take care that it does not enter through you."
--Chris Floyd
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