Jack is back. The sixth season of the hit Fox series 24 premiered this week. Despite some new plot twists, like a suitcase nuke in LA and concentration camps for Muslim-Americans, the show seems, once again, to be centered around the contention that torture is not just effective, it’s pretty much the only way to save the home-front from certain doom. GNN recently asked Stephen Grey, the author of Ghost Plane, an exposé of the CIA’s rendition program which allegedly sent hundreds of terror suspects to be tortured in foreign prisons, about how he tracked the secret program, where the suspects were allegedly taken, and if torture actually works like it does on TV.

GNN: Here in the U.S. 24 is a huge hit. Is it as big a sensation in the UK?

Stephen Grey: The first series of 24 was more popular in the UK than the US; I read that Fox were thinking of canceling the show until it caught on in the UK. It’s not quite the same sensation any more – but it’s still big!

GNN: Of course, there’s no real way of know how much a TV shapes public opinion, but I think there’s little doubt that the Jack Bauer school of counter-terror operations is tolerated, if not wholly endorsed, by most Americans. What do Brits think?

Stephen Grey: I doubt there are many people, either Brits or Americans, who aren’t cheering on Jack Bauer, however illegal or brutal some of his methods are. After all, the action is made very personal, with the life of Bauer’s family in danger or time bombs literally ticking away.

Here’s though what makes him a screen hero: whatever method he uses, he uses himself, and then he stands up and takes the consequences. As one U.S. military officer told me, if we need to torture terrorists to get information, we should do it ourselves. Handing over our interrogations to other countries like Egypt that we know do torture, and then shutting our eyes, would be “the coward’s way out.”

Bauer’s actions are also justified by the heat of the battle – after all, it all takes place in 24 hours. In the real War on Terror, there are prisoners still getting tortured some five years after their arrest – that’s 43,800 hours, if my math is right.

GNN: In your book, you detail how a small fleet of corporate jets were used to snatch terror suspects and take them into a secret network of prisons. But this program isn’t new. It started under Clinton. How did this story finally break? How did you track down the planes?

Stephen Grey: This secret program began under President Clinton as a way of dealing with wanted Islamic terrorists around the globe, partly because politicians wouldn’t sanction risking American lives to take more direct action, like going to capture Osama bin Laden in Sudan or Afghanistan.

After 9/11, the story of this program began leaking out, mainly as security officials worked hard to show how they hadn’t been ignoring the threat from Al Qaeda; they were doing secret things.

Then, I heard this Clinton program had been dramatically expanded by President Bush. It was being used for hundreds of prisoners – they were being sent to countries even where they were not wanted for any crime; many of them were quite minor figures, but also some key Al Qaeda suspects where the CIA had chosen to “out-source” their interrogation into foreign hands.

Little by little, some prisoners who were rendered and tortured got to tell their story or smuggle it out of jail. But why should they believed? We were told that terrorists make up stories about torture.

Then, I got an aviation source to reveal the flight logs of a fleet of CIA planes as they moved around the globe – and this proved what the prisoners were saying was true: their stories of being snatched up by men in black ski masks and taken on these planes to torture locations were shown to be exactly right.

If Watergate was about following the money, rendition was about following he planes. I ended up with thousands of CIA flight plans – it as a huge record of global covert action.

GNN: You compare the program to Soviet Gulag system that existed as a sort of separate universe where everyday reality disappeared. Ironically, they are using Soviet-era facilities in Eastern Europe to al Qaeda suspects.

Stephen Grey: You can’t compare the numbers involved to the Soviet Gulag; nor does it involve the mass murder that happened under Stalin.

The comparison is the surreal nature of the system; like the Soviet Gulag, the system of prisons around the world controlled by the U.S. and its allies used for suspected terrorists exist as a kind of parallel universe – people been snatched from normal streets, normal airports, and many of the prisons exist right next door to normal people living normal lives.

Like people in the Soviet Union, you can just choose to ignore these places exist or these things are going on – that is, unless you get snatched up into the system.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Archipelago, his huge dossier on the Soviet system: “And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.”

GNN: Which suspects where taken to the European locations, and which where taken to places like Syria and Egypt?

Stephen Grey: We know of a few suspects taken from Europe – like a terrorist suspect Abu Omar who was snatched from the streets of Milan. Italian police were preparing charges to send him to jail in Italy, but instead he was, according to an Italian prosecutor, picked up by a team of CIA operatives and sent to prison in Cairo, where said he was brutally tortured.

Some of the CIA’s most ‘high value’ prisoners have been kept in the CIA’s own custody – where ‘enhanced methods’ like water-boarding, sound bombardment or sleep deprivation have been used to persuade them to talk. The location of these so-called black sites is still a closely-guarded secret but there is evidence that some of them were in Europe, possibly Poland and Romania. At least one prisoner was held in a U.S. camp in Bosnia too. I met one prisoner, now released and living back in Yemen, who was held in such a black site, which appeared to be in Europe, but because he was blindfolded and gagged during his journey to the prison, and never saw daylight when he was there, he couldn’t say exactly where it was.

In the early days after September 11, some really important prisoners were handed over to foreign custody for interrogation. These include Mohamed Haydar Zammar, captured in Morocco and believed to be someone who helped recruit the Hamburg Cell behind the September 11 attacks. He was handed over the Syrians. Then there was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libbi, an alleged Al Qaeda camp commander captured on the Pakistan border in late 2001. He was first questioned by the FBI in Afghanistan, but then the CIA came and took him off the FBI, trussed him up in a box (literally) and sent him off to Egypt for interrogation.

GNN: How big was the program? How many prisoners were taken? Where did the torture take place? What was some of the worst techniques that were used?

Stephen Grey: Although President Bush has now acknowledge that renditions do occur, the administration gives no figures on the numbers of renditions. I identified more than 80 cases. CIA sources told me the numbers were in the ‘low hundreds,’ but there are actually thousands of prisoners arrested after 9/11 but un-accounted for. More than 10,000 prisoners have been processed in Afghanistan alone. Around 700 have been sent to Guantanamo, Cuba; some have been released, but many others are likely to have been rendered or “repatriated” (the U.S. military term for renditions).

These renditions were to many key countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Syria, Yemen and Libya. Not everyone was tortured, but these are countries that use torture regularly as documented in detail by … the U.S. government.

Different destinations have different torture specialties. Uzbekistan (run by an ex-Communist, President Karimov) is infamous for boiling enemies of the state alive, Egypt has made use of every kind of torture from electric shock treatment to sexual assault; Syria is famous for its ‘German chair’ that bends the spine, sometimes to breaking point; and in Morocco, one prisoner now in Guantanamo, Binyam Mohamed, described being cut over his body, including on his genitals with razor blades: that was after being sent to Morocco from Pakistan in a CIA Gulfstream (his story of rendition is corroborated by flight logs, and other prisoners in Morocco have recounted similar tortures).

GNN: Is there evidence that the U.S. personnel directly involved, or was it all outsourced?

Stephen Grey: We don’t know if CIA personnel actually took part in any interrogations in these countries. Normal CIA rules would prohibit this and so it seems unlikely, even if some prisoners report the presence of western witnesses. But CIA operatives did send lists of questions and had liaison officers in-country to collect the intelligence that resulted.

CIA was involved in its own program of ‘extended interrogation’ in its own ‘black site’ prisons; by almost all definitions techniques like waterboarding did amount to torture. The difference here – all the techniques of torture were approved by the Department of Justice and the White House. It wasn’t a freelance operation. But that doesn’t mean the CIA operatives involved feel save from being made scapegoats and prosecuted.

GNN: Did any useful information at all come out of any of the renditions?

Stephen Grey: It’s naïve to imagine no good information comes from renditions and the transfer of suspects to countries with their own ‘special methods’ of interrogation – even if the main goal of renditions was often just to disappear the prisoners rather than interrogate them.

The problem with intelligence from torture is, while it may be true, it is as likely to be not true. Faced with multiple threats, CIA analysts are deluged with too much information and so torture can muddy the water.

After being rendered to Egpyt, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libbi told a convincing story of how Saddam Hussein was training Al Qaeda with chemical weapons. The intelligence was considered so important it was used by Colin Powell before the United Nations security council to persuade the world to back the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, at the hands of the Egyptians, al-Libbi was confessing to lies. It wasn’t true and the report was later withdrawn by the CIA.

Many experienced interrogators also say that even if torture can work, it isn’t necessary to make someone talk.

President Bush in September last year defended ‘extended methods’ of interrogation and how they persuaded key terrorists to talk, people like Khaled Sheikh Mohamed and Ramzi Binalshibh, the two key men who devised the September 11 attacks. And yet months before either terrorist was arrested, both had confessed to their role in September 11 in an interview with Al Jazeera television. There was no torture involved there.

GNN: What is the European community doing about it now?

Stephen Grey: The CIA rendition program made use of airbases, airports and airspace across Europe; and some secret prisons too in European territory.

The revelation of these activities has put European governments on the spot to reveal what they knew. The evidence suggests, many European governments knew much of what was going on, but they were happy to stay silent while the program was a secret.

Now, investigations are being led into rendition by police and prosecutors in Milan, Italy (looking into a rendition from Milan in February 2003), in Munich, Germany (looking into the rendition of a German citizen from Macedonia in January 2004), and in Madrid, Spain (looking at the widespread use of Spanish airports). Police and politicians in neutral countries like Austria and Switzerland are also investigating potential illegal violations of their air space.

Many in Europe regard the program as a breach of trust. They would rather terrorists be brought to trial before a jury, not sent to a secret jail.

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Stephen Grey is a 38-year-old journalist based in London UK, writing mainly about national security issues. A former editor of the Sunday Times’ investigations unit, the Insight Team, he continues to contribute to the Sunday Times, as well contributing recently to The New York Times, Guardian, Times, Independent, Newsweek, the Atlantic Monthly. He has reported for BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio Four and World Service.

Reviews of Ghost Plane:

“Inside the CIA’s Secret Prisons Program – An explosive new book provides a rare glimpse into the full extent of the agency’s controversial terror renditions – and the curious coalition of partners who helped the U.S. pull them off ”- Time Magazine.

“The secret police of Middle Eastern countries freely torture, and their tools of the trade – as Stephen Grey shows in his powerful and damning “Ghost Plane” – include razor blades … His attention to detail can be chilling.” ... The Washington Post

For more see www.ghostplane.net

SOURCE: GNN. TV