I thought this was intriguing. Would anyone with aircraft experience care to give their view about this?villagevoice.com wrote:We'll call him "Ray." He's asked that we not reveal his real name; he's simply not interested in having his identity known. We're driving just behind his SUV, and, after several hours on the road, we've finally come to a stop on a muddy dirt track just northeast of Sacramento in California's Central Valley, near the towns of Marysville and Yuba City. This is the California hinterlands. Ray has brought us here because nearby is a large chunk of restricted airspace, a slice of sky cordoned off for the exclusive use of Beale Air Force Base.
Ray is a planespotter�a person obsessed with almost everything having to do with aviation. As a hobby, Ray tracks airplanes, logs their serial numbers and movements, analyzes their radio systems, and keeps detailed records of the frequencies and designs that their systems use. He tries to understand how aviation systems work, how planes communicate with the ground controllers and with each other, and how the military and the Federal Aviation Administration manage various kinds of airspace. On this mild spring day, Ray's testing a new piece of gear: a Kinetic Avionics SBS-1, a "virtual radar" system. Attached to his laptop with a USB cable, the system allows him to watch air traffic within a forty- or fifty-mile radius and to log call signs and basic information about the planes.
Because Ray, who lives in the suburbs outside San Francisco, says that "tracking cargo and commercial aircraft near Oakland or San Francisco is way too easy," our goal for the day is to track something a little more challenging: U-2 spy planes.
From our vantage point, we can see two of the infamous black spy planes circling lazily in the distance like giant condors. Ray fiddles with the gaggle of cables, antennae, rack-mounted radios, and the flashing LEDs of the electronic devices pouring out the hatchback of his SUV. Speakers sputter with the sound of military pilots periodically checking in with the control towers: "Dragon 73 on approach...."
"Dragon" is a popular call sign for the U-2, whose reputation for being difficult to fly has earned it the nickname "Dragon Lady."
On the screen of Ray's laptop is a list of all the planes that his "radar" sees�most are commercial flights: Alaska Airways, Southwest, and so on�and next to each identifying number is a call sign, a registration number, a country of origin, and an altitude indicator. At the bottom of the screen are a handful of numbers without registration information attached to them. These represent all of the military aircraft in the area. Some have call signs and some do not.
"REACH347 is probably a cargo-plane on an overseas flight," says Ray, referring to one of the military call signs, "as in �reaching' across the ocean." He illustrates the call sign by extending his arm out toward the horizon as if he were placing a chess piece on the far side of a giant playing board. The call sign "GO DAWGS" is more ambiguous, although Ray surmises that it's some kind of inside joke�maybe a reference to the March Madness basketball tournament then going on. In the distance, a U-2 slowly climbs away from the base. On Ray's laptop, one of the unidentified planes' altitude numbers slowly keep time: 900 ft., 1,000 ft....
"You're sure you see a U-2 ascending?" he asks us as he watches his screen. We answer yes, and then he writes down the number of the plane, filling in a small piece of the puzzle that the blank spots on the screen represent.
In Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, there is a scene where Watson studies an article over breakfast. When finished, he concludes that article's "reasoning was close and intense," but that its deductions were "far-fetched and exaggerated� �From a drop of water,' said the writer, �a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.' "
Holmes, however, replies to Watson's criticism unambiguously: The conclusions are not far-fetched at all, for he knows that from a mosaic of seemingly disparate facts, a composite picture can easily begin to emerge.
And the image that Ray has created from all the data he's harvested is a dark and grainy one, a picture that has as much to do with the Bush administration's war on terror as it does with aviation. Ray was one of the first people to use planespotting techniques to expose the Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition program, which relies on a fleet of low-profile aircraft to whisk terrorism suspects to dungeons around the world where they're tortured and abused.
Planespotters like Ray know that airplanes can be identified by their tail numbers (which can change) and also by serial numbers (which do not). They also know that a civilian aircraft moving around the world leaves evidence of where it has been. There are geographical facts about where the plane was, and temporal facts about when it was in a particular place. Taken together, some of these seemingly inconsequential facts about airplane movements have gone a long way in documenting the activities of the CIA.
To be sure, planespotting might seem an eccentric hobby. Essentially, it is about paying attention to airplane traffic and keeping detailed logs of this traffic. There is a kind of nerdy satisfaction to be had from all this work and documentation; it's like successfully putting a puzzle together, solving a Rubik's Cube, or getting a high score in Tetris. It's about taking a seemingly chaotic set of circumstances (like air traffic at an airport), analyzing it, and appreciating the underlying order present in the system�"solving" the system. But unlike a cardboard puzzle, aviation systems are always changing, so the picture is never entirely complete. Effective planespotting takes extraordinary amounts of patience and extreme attention to even the most obscure details of a given system.
The tools of the planespotters' trade go from the tried-and-true to beyond-the-bleeding-edge. Most of the world's planespotters use nothing more sophisticated than notebooks, pencils, and still cameras. When a plane arrives at or departs from a given airport, the planespotter will write down the plane's tail number, owner, and the exact time of the event. If a particularly intriguing plane comes through, he or she might take a picture. After a day's planespotting, the hobbyist might post their logs and images to a forum like Airliners.net or Planespotters.net.
Taking planespotting to the next technological level means getting some radios involved, and there are a huge number of variations on this theme. The most basic level of radio-logging involves a scanner�a kind of radio that can pick up frequencies far above and below commercial AM and FM stations. A lot of the world runs on radio frequencies, and aircraft are no exception. Basic planespotting with a radio involves tuning to aviation frequencies and listening to traffic between pilots and ground controllers. By listening to air traffic, one can get much of the same information that someone at the airport with a pencil and notebook can get. In addition, one can analyze how the radio systems themselves work. People who do this kind of "monitoring" also post extensive logs to online forums.
But radio methods aren't limited to eavesdropping on air traffic. The airwaves are filled with far more information than just voice traffic. Moving toward the advanced end of radio-planespotting, there's ACARS, an acronym for Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System. Put simply, ACARS is like an automated email system used by aircraft and ground control. An ACARS-enabled plane will transmit all kinds of information about what the plane is doing: where it is and where it's going, how much fuel it has, what the weather is like, and so on. These automated "emails" between aircraft and their ground controllers are encoded into radio signals clustered around the 131 megahertz and 136 megahertz frequencies.
A good scanner can receive these radio signals. To the ear, the transmissions sound like noise, but when filtered through a computer equipped with a software-based decoder the information contained in the airplanes' messages becomes comprehensible. Like notebooks filled with tail numbers and landing times, ACARS monitoring produces an endless stream of ridiculously detailed information, which ACARS enthusiasts from around the world dutifully post online.
As complicated and powerful as ACARS-logging seems, there's another vastly more powerful technique at the far end of the planespotting spectrum: the data feeds.
The data feeds work like this: The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, (a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation) publishes a constant stream of information for all of the air traffic in and around the U.S., which is called the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS). Air traffic controllers use the data to help coordinate air traffic and keep the skies safe. And numerous commercial services stream this over the Internet to anyone with a fast connection and a little bit of money. That means planespotters can just type the tail numbers of planes they want to watch into the Website of a service like Flight Aware and get all the ETMS data they want.
But there's a catch: Some of the more interesting planes, including many CIA vehicles, are "blocked"�that is, they've been filtered out of the data feed at the plane owner's request.
However, as any thirteen-year-old computer programmer will tell you, where there's software, there's a hack. There's no video game protection, no DVD encryption scheme, no firewall, or copy-protection algorithm that someone, somewhere, hasn't figured out how to hack. And in the information age, attempts to block the flow of digital data, whether it's copy-protected movies or flight logs, are practically invitations to a hacking contest. That means a dedicated planespotter�or investigative reporter or human rights advocate�can figure out where even the CIA aircraft are going.
Ray is somewhat unusual among planespotters because, much more than others with the same hobby, he tends to move beyond the "How does it work?" questions and venture into "What does it all mean?" When he logs new aircraft or sees suspicious movements, he's quick to check newspapers and, when necessary, file Freedom of Information Act requests to develop a deeper understanding of what he's logged. Because he follows up his planespotting with intensive database and Internet searches, phone calls to journalists and public-affairs officers at military bases and airports, he's made some discoveries about the workings of the U.S. military and other government agencies that add up to much more than a sum of collected data. That's how he inadvertently discovered the CIA's fleet of "torture planes." He became aware of the network of unmarked airplanes, front companies, and unexplained incidents involving American "civilians" around the world after noticing a collection of unusual aircraft at a remote airstrip in central Nevada called Base Camp. "If you want to know about how I started tracking these torture planes," Ray would later explain to us, "I think we're going to have to talk about Base Camp."
Base Camp is about ten miles northeast of Warm Springs at the junction of Highway 6 and Highway 395 in Nevada's remote Hot Creek Valley. Base Camp is little more than a dusty collection of trailers with an adjacent 7,300-foot airstrip. It's an active, albeit small, installation, and no one outside of government knows for sure what goes on there. The facility was originally built in the late 1960s to house Project Faultless, an exploratory effort to move underground nuclear testing away from the Nevada Test Site. (Las Vegas casinos had begun to complain about the earth-trembling explosions just to their north.) After a particularly disruptive January 1969 test at the Faultless headquarters, the Atomic Energy Commission deemed this part of Nevada unsuitable for further nuclear testing and closed shop at Base Camp. Today the Air Force runs Base Camp, though it remains unclear just what goes on there.
And this is why Base Camp is so interesting to planespotters. Base Camp certainly looks like a secret military base. First, the runway has large "Xs" painted on either end, a mark that usually means an airfield has been decommissioned or is otherwise unsafe for landing. This is suspicious because planes definitely fly in and out of the place. Second, there are persistent rumors that Base Camp is somehow connected to the "non-existent" Area 51 base to the south, which definitely does exist and definitely has nothing to do with aliens�in reality Area 51 has long served as a test site for experimental aircraft. The U-2 and F-117A stealth fighter, among others, were developed there. Unmarked passenger planes spotted flying into Area 51 have also been seen at Base Camp.
In late 2001, Ray was out in the Nevada wilds stalking classified aircraft when he decided to take a detour past Base Camp on the off chance that something was going on. As Ray approached the airfield in his dusty 4x4, he almost crashed his truck when he saw what was happening. There on the tarmac were a total of four unmarked aircraft�and he didn't recognize several of the models. Ray decided to play it cool and quietly drove past the collection of planes and a small crowd of people in civilian clothes clustered around them who appeared to be refueling the planes. When he was out of sight, Ray pulled over, attached a telephoto lens to his camera, and loaded it with a fresh roll of Fuji slide film. Ray then turned his truck back around toward Base Camp, stopped near the fence line, opened the car door, and click, click, click, click�"I got all the tail numbers, then put on a 55mm lens to get a group photo. Around then, I realized that they were watching me, so I got back in the car and high-tailed it out of there."
Later that night, from a desert motel near the town of Caliente, Ray posted his findings to an online forum. "There were four planes at Base Camp today," he wrote, "which is exactly four more planes than I ever saw there before."
Two of the planes, a Pilatus PC-6 Porter and a Construcciones Aeron�uticas S.A. (aka CASA) CN-235 had military serial numbers: 56039 and 66049. Two "civilian" Cessnas had the tail numbers N403VP and N208NN. A quick search of an FAA registration database showed the two "civilian" planes were owned by a company called One Leasing.
Within a couple of hours of Ray's post, the Internet started crackling with excitement. "Guys, we are onto something here," posted one person to a popular listserv. "I just did a Yahoo search on �3511 Silverside 105' "�One Leasing's published address�"and found DOZENS of different companies at that same address and suite #. Look for yourself. What is going on here??!"
The planespotters initially assumed that the collection of aircraft had something to do with Area 51. Could it be a crash-recovery team for some kind of classified aircraft? But over the next few days, someone wrote that they'd spotted these same planes at North Carolina's Camp Mackall Army Air Field, home of the Delta Force and other Special Operations groups. Someone else discovered that the Base Camp planes were assigned to the USAF 427th Special Operations Squadron at Pope Air Force Base, which reported to the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Florida. Other planes from this squadron had been detached to Incirlik, Turkey, since the early 1990s and were suspected of flying missions into northern Iraq. The collection of planes spotted at Base Camp started to look less like something to do with the experimental aircraft tested at Area 51, and more like some kind of Special Forces, or even CIA, operation in progress.
A few months later, Ray learned through "back channels" that his post about the Base Camp planes had caused heads to roll somewhere in the shadowy world of military "black ops." Apparently, someone, somewhere, had lost a job because of Ray's photos. At a desert bar, one of his friends�a man with an unspecified connection to Base Camp�warned him over beers to "stop messing with those Base Camp guys or you'll wind up dead in the desert with two bullets in the back of your head."
"Wouldn't one bullet be enough?" asked Ray.
Ray started thinking about what he'd seen at Base Camp, and started to think that these planes' registration numbers might be the kinds of water drops that oceans could be deduced from. In his research he got ahold of something called the CALP (Civil Air Landing Permits), an Army document that listed the names of all civilian aircraft companies cleared to land at Army installations and the names of the installations they're cleared to land at. From the CALP, Ray compiled an index of obscure companies with clearance to land wherever they wanted, including such sensitive installations as Bucholz Army Airfield (on the South Pacific island of Kwajalein, home of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site) and Wake Army Airfield, a highly restricted island base in the north Pacific. One Leasing appeared on the CALP, so did a host other companies, including Richmor Aviation, Stevens Express Leasing, Tepper Aviation, Path Corporation, Rapid Air Trans, Aviation Specialties, Devon Holding and Leasing, Crowell Aviation, and Premier Executive Transport Services.
When he put all these aircraft onto his watch list and started collecting information about their movements, Ray discovered some very interesting things. For starters, he noticed that Premier's planes were shuttling to and from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, home of the notorious extraterritorial prison, as was another plane, a Gulfstream jet owned by "Assembly Point Aviation," an aviation business helmed by one of the Boston Red Sox's co-owners. Ray's logs started looking like this:
N85VM � ASSEMBLY POINT AVIATION (Operated by Richmor Aviation)
12/16/2002 OXC > IAD (Oxford, Connecticut, to Dulles, Washington D.C.)
12/20/2002 KIAD > MUGM (Dulles, Washington D.C., to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba)
12/20/2002 MUGM > KIAD (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Dulles, Washington D.C.)
12/20/2002 IAD > SWF (Dulles, Washington D.C., to Hudson, New York)
12/23/2002 SWF > SCH (Hudson, New York, to Schenectady, New York)
In addition to domestic flights, the Assembly Point plane was making trips to places like Morocco, Romania, Qatar, and Guantanamo Bay. As Ray recalls, "When I saw them flying to Guantanamo Bay, that's when I realized these things were the real deal."
Ray wasn't alone�planespotters around the world were also beginning to notice these unusual planes and beginning to see entirely unpredicted connections between various unmarked aircraft and suspicious events around the world. The Internet was making it far easier to track aircraft and to share information with other planespotters around the world, and the Bush administration's war on terror, now in full swing, was providing plenty of suspicious activities to monitor.
Since Ray began his hunting, many of the planes on the CALP have been linked to extraordinary rendition, by human rights groups and the mainstream media. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has identified the Boeing 737 owned by Premier as the aircraft that transported Khaled el-Masri to four months of detention and torture in a secret prison in Afghanistan. El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was eventually freed and dumped by the CIA on a hillside in Albania, and has since sued the U.S. government for his treatment.
At least one of the planes that initially piqued Ray's interest met an unfortunate fate: The One Leasing Cessna made headlines when, in February 2003, it crashed in Colombia over territory controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerillas. The guerillas executed a passenger and the plane's American pilot.
British journalist Stephen Grey has adopted the methodology of the planespotters, constructing a database of flight logs using reports from planespotting websites, data from the ETMS system, and from other sources in the aviation industry. "I started to analyze what I found in the logs," he tells us from London, "and I found there was a definite link between the flights recorded in the logs, reports of renditions, and accounts of current and former prisoners." Grey has used his material to contribute reports to the New York Times, Newsweek, the Guardian, and other papers�the data helped Grey write stories when other facts were almost impossible to come by.
Another person who's cultivated plane-tracking prowess, is John Sifton, a New York-based researcher with Human Rights Watch. In a small office at the HRW headquarters on the thirty-fourth floor of the Empire State Building in New York City, Sifton grabs a pencil and rummages around for a blank piece of paper. He then draws a crude map of the world and starts drawing lines across it. A straight line connects Kabul to Rabat, Morocco; another one connects Frankfurt, Germany, to Washington D.C. Sifton is trim, with blond hair and the unshaven face of someone who's been up for too many nights. He speaks with the combination of vitriol and confidence that's an unwritten job requirement for people in his business. As a terrorism and counterterrorism researcher, Sifton's duties include investigating and exposing the most egregious excesses of the United States' war on terror.
He is showing us how, by tracking CIA flights, he was able to unveil the CIA's secret European prisons. When editors at the Washington Post backed down under CIA pressure in November 2005 and declined to publish the names of two "European democracies" suspected of housing these facilities, Sifton immediately cranked out a report fingering Poland and Romania by name. Sifton and the Post had independently reached the same conclusions, but it was Sifton who named the names.
Whereas most planespotters are fixated on the actual aircraft, Sifton studies the specific destinations of the rendition flights. In doing so, he has helped expose secret CIA prisons, but he is also keeping a watchful eye on the ever-changing roster of torture planes. "What I'm interested in are flights that aren't clear refueling stops along the way from one country to another," says Sifton after recounting the flight paths of several well-known rendition flights. "It's a simple question of geometry. This kind of flight," he explains while drawing a relatively straight line from Germany to Ireland to the United States, "isn't that interesting to us."
"What becomes interesting is anything which is�what do they say in geometry? Acute. Any kind of acute angle between arrival and departure becomes interesting to us because it suggests that the stop was a destination. A place you wanted to go." Sifton draws a line from the Middle East to Germany to Poland, an acute angle: "We were especially interested in airports that were not large, public airports.... Frankfurt is not even close to being a suitable candidate for an extremely sensitive clandestine CIA detention operation. By contrast, a small rural airport which isn't even open for regular civilian transport such as Szymany airport [in Poland] becomes suspicious, especially because it appears to be a destination."
A military airfield on the eastern coast of Romania, Mihail Kogalniceanu, also drew Sifton's attention for the same reasons. The Mihail Kogalniceanu airfield, just north of Constanta, has been used by the United States since 2002 for operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The base had been closed to journalists and the public since early 2004. Donald Rumsfeld had visited in October 2004. It was suspicious.
There were other things about Poland and Romania that stood out to Sifton. Flight logs would show a plane landing one place in either country, then taking off from a different place only minutes later. These sorts of little glitches and inconsistencies in the records didn't occur elsewhere. Other flight logs showed direct flights from Kabul to the Romanian cities of Bucharest and Timisoara, Romania, and to the aforementioned Szymany, Poland.
Sifton started making calls to officials in Poland and Romania, trying to figure out what might be going on. "As we made inquiries, we got what I like to call �reverberations'�a sense that something is going on. You'd ask people something and they'd respond in such a way that made you think something was going on. Not proof of anything, but it kept our interest." Eventually, he compiled enough information to make a public allegation.
As planespotters have long done, Sifton learned how to read the flight logs of known torture planes, following where they departed, arrived, and stopped along the way. As Sifton and other human rights campaigners learned, flight logs became much more convincing when coupled with other pieces of evidence. When multiple sources of information "reverberated" together, researchers could put together a convincing mosaic from bits and pieces of fragmentary information. Flight logs implicating Poland and Romania as potential locations of black sites, for example, were corroborated by the testimony of three Yemeni men who the United States held incommunicado for more than eighteen months at a series of secret prisons in what appear to be at least three different countries.
Mohammed Faraj Bashmilah and Salah Nasir Salim 'Ali Qaru were arrested in Jordan and turned over to the United States in October of 2003. After being released in Yemen in March 2006, they provided stories that are among the very few accounts from people who have been held at the Eastern European black sites and released. When Amnesty International interviewed these men, they could provide little information about the locations of the countries where they'd been held, but their accounts of flight times and the conditions of the prisons made some strong suggestions. Like others, Bashmilah and Salim were first taken to Afghanistan on a flight from Jordan that lasted about four hours. They knew that the prison in Afghanistan where they were held was run exclusively by Americans, and the men later said that they'd been held with a number of "important, high-ranking" prisoners, one of whom managed to tell them that he had not been held permanently at any one location and had been transferred with the rest of the group from place to place. Each prisoner was held in complete isolation in a 6'x12' cell. Two surveillance cameras were installed on either side of the cell, and the prisoners were permanently chained to a ring fixed in the floor by chain that was not long enough to allow the prisoners to reach the door. Prisoners were taken outside for twenty minutes once a week, when they were brought into a courtyard and made to sit in a chair facing a wall.
Toward the end of April of 2004, the men were prepared for transfer to another prison. They described a procedure similar to that of other rendition victims' accounts: They were stripped, put in diapers and overalls, then handcuffed, blindfolded, put in a face mask, had earplugs inserted into their ears, and were hooded with earphones over their hoods. The whole operation was conducted quickly and professionally by a team of black-clad and masked Americans.
After several hours, Bashmilah and Salim's plane landed. They were then thrown into a helicopter with a dozen or more other prisoners. The helicopter flew approximately two and a half to three hours before landing, at which point the men were put in a car and taken to the black site. The car ride was between ten and fifteen minutes away from the helicopter's landing site along a bumpy road. When they got out of the car, the men were led up a flight of stairs, then into the building and down a ramp or slope. The walls were freshly painted, the toilets were modern, and the prison was highly organized and well-staffed.
There were a number of indications that they were in Eastern Europe, or at least not in a Muslim country. The hours of daylight fluctuated over the year, with sundown coming between 4:30 p.m. and 8:45 p.m., indicating they were significantly north of the Middle East. In the winter, they described being extremely cold, colder than anything they'd previously experienced. The food was also foreign to the men. The Americans served them food that they described as "European"�slices of bread, rice with canned meat, yogurt, and salad. On one occasion, they were served pizza, which they had never eaten before. On Fridays, Americans served the men Kit Kat bars.
In May 2005, the United States Embassy in Yemen informed the Yemini government that it would be returning Bashmilah, Salim, and another Yemini named Mohammed al-Assad to the country. The United States provided no evidence that the men had done anything wrong. After a seven-hour flight, the men were handed over to Yemini officials, who in turn held them in prison for nine months before finally releasing them on February 13, 2006.
When Bashmilah and Salim were finally able to give testimony about their interrogation in Eastern Europe�which was soon released by Amnesty International�John Sifton at Human Rights Watch wasn't surprised by what he heard. By tracking known torture planes, he already known that people kidnapped by the CIA were being taken to Eastern Europe. Like Ray the planespotter, Sifton knew how to use flight logs to predict such stories.
It's not surprise that planespotting has turned into a rather large annoyance for the CIA, a "scourge" in the words of the Guardian. Over time, it came to seem as if every big operation the CIA undertook had been documented, somehow, by planespotters.
While it is tempting to overstate hobbyist planespotters' contribution to unmasking the extraordinary rendition program�as there are precious few people involved in the activity that go to the lengths that people like Ray have to decode the movements of suspicious aircraft�planespotters' peculiar skill set has brought many important clues about the CIA's work to the surface, meaning that the agency has had a difficult time keeping its work secret.
When a plane with the tale number N313P was implicated in CIA's program, for instance, journalists and human rights researchers were able to find a planespotter's photo of the aircraft on the tarmac of Son San Juan airport on the island of Mallorca. Using the photograph, they were able to convince airport officials in Skopje, Macedonia, to show them their aviation records from January 23, 2004, the day German citizen Khaled El-Masri claimed to have been abducted from Macedonia.
The records showed that the N313P, a 737 Boeing Business Jet, had filed the following flight plan: Palma de Mallorca�Skopje, Macedonia�Baghdad, Iraq�Kabul, Afghanistan. Further investigation by other researchers showed that there was even more to the flight plan�the actual "circuit" had been Larnaca, Cyprus�Rabat, Morocco�Kabul, Afghanistan�Algiers, Algeria�Palma de Mallorca�Skopje, Macedonia�Baghdad, Iraq�Kabul, Afghanistan�Timisoara, Romania�Palma de Mallorca�Washington D.C. The flight logs corroborated Khaled El-Masri's story, and journalists had a photo to illustrate their story.
The planespotter who had started this chain of events had no idea what he was doing by posting the photo online. He was just documenting the landing, which he assumed was that of an American millionaire, as part of his hobby.
Planespotting - tracking the CIA's "torture taxi"
Moderator: Alyrium Denryle
Planespotting - tracking the CIA's "torture taxi"
I'm all for this sort of thing. Torture is a crime like slave trading, genocide, piracy and war crimes: It can be tried under any jurisdiction no matter the nationality of the perpetrator, victim, or where the crime took place. I hope human rights groups compile dossiers on everyone involved in the torture flights, kangaroo commissions and other atrocities -and distributes the information worldwide. If the Torture Act is upheld by the Supreme Court, then it's up to foreign jurisdictions to mete out justice. It worked somewhat on Pinochet.
