Dem Now! Interview With Author of "Ghost Plane"

[Jcrowley]

STEPHEN GREY: That’s right. I’ve been sitting on this information for quite some time, pouring over it. And I used these flight logs, these thousands of routes taken by CIA planes since September 11th, to help me with the research for the book I wrote and all of the work I’ve done on rendition. But I thought it was time to put that stuff out in the public domain for two reasons. First of all, to be absolutely clear, to deal with any critics who said, “Well, how can you show these planes really are CIA planes? How can you prove what you’ve said?” Since we last spoke, I think I said to you, I named a company involved, Aero Contractors in North Carolina, as being at the center of a CIA plane operation.

<snip>

That means that people like Khaled el-Masri, you’ve heard from, the German citizen kidnapped in Macedonia, taken to Afghanistan to a secret prison there, people like Maher Arar, the Canadian taken from New York to Syria, all these people that are claiming some justice, some explanation or compensation, are being told they can’t get any answers because it’s a state secret. So, by publishing these proofs in the form of these flight logs, I’m showing that it’s very, very clear. It’s not a state secret. It’s not secret information. It’s absolutely clear that it was the CIA that was responsible for the transfer of people under this rendition program and for these specific cases.

And if I may, there’s a second reason, as well, for publishing this information, which is -- it touches on what Mr. Tyrie was just saying about drawing a line under things -- you know, we can’t draw a line under this whole program until we find out what’s happened to all the hundreds -- in fact, thousands -- of people that have actually disappeared in this whole program. And that goes beyond what I was talking to you about before, because there have been more than 5,000 -- in fact, 10,000 prisoners that were processed by the United States in Afghanistan after September 11th. And we don’t know what’s happened to all these people. We know that many, many people have disappeared. We know about 700 were sent to Guantanamo. We know that several hundred were rendered. But the rest of them, you know, we can’t be sure what’s happened to them. And I wanted to publish as much information as possible showing the movement of these planes to see if we can try and pin down the fate of some people that have disappeared. Because I think unless we actually show what we’ve done with people, we can’t really draw a line under this whole issue.

<snip>

STEPHEN GREY: Yes, well, you can see that in these flight logs. They don’t just show the transfer of prisoners, but you can see every time there’s a key detainee picked up around the world, there’s a plane takes off from Washington straight to that location, or to where we think they’ve taken this prisoner, including flights to -- there’s a flight there to Diego Garcia, for example, which is new. And that’s in the Indian Ocean and long denied as a place where they hold prisoners. But you can see every time that someone’s taken, including Saddam Hussein, a plane takes off, taking interrogators.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/06/1429257

http://www.ghostplane.net/