NORTH CAROLINA
STOP TORTURE
NOW

PO Box 50345
Raleigh, NC 27650
e-mail via:
contact AT ncstoptorturenow.net

(919) 834-4478
(evenings, or messages during business hours)

North Carolina Stop Torture Now is a grassroots coalition of individuals representing themselves and a diversity of faith, human rights, peace, veteran, and student groups across the state.

We aim to stop torture everywhere, and have worked since 2005 to expose and end North Carolina's central role in the ongoing U.S. torture program.

Our special focus has been on the "torture taxis" of Aero Contractors, Ltd. of Smithfield, and Centurion Aviation of Fayetteville. Both are nominally private companies linked to the operation of aircraft in clandestine support of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. Extraordinary rendition is a phrase that disguises the kidnap, detention and torture of individuals alleged to be enemies of the United States, including those guilty of nothing other than being misidentified.

Aero Contractors' headquarters is located at the Johnston County Airport near Smithfield, NC, and you can view a partial list of detainees who were disappeared and subsequently tortured at the Aero Flew Them page, or directly on this PDF document.

We are particularly concerned that state and local government officials and individual citizens recognize their own complicity in the extraordinary rendition program and take prompt steps to provide restorative justice to victims and survivors, to air a full account of human rights violations, and to demand top-down accountability for the authors and perpetrators.

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JOIN US at our next meeting
4:30 p.m., Sunday, April 18

Founders' Hall, directly below sanctuary
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh (UUFR)
3313 Wade Avenue

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Weaving a Net of Accountability: Taking on extraordinary rendition at the state and regional levels

The three-day conference detailed at Weaving a Net of Accountability, was launched by an interfaith service attended by about 40 who were led in reflections on the congregation of humanity's obligation to our brothers and sisters, and featured a keynote address by Scott Horton, a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, author of the blog “No Comment” and an expert on international law and extraordinary rendition.

Horton told an audience of about 90, including U.S. Representative David Price (NC – Fouth District), his view of the talk's title "The Unresolved Legacy of Guantánamo" as shorthand for the nation's retreat from the rule of law and citizens' obligation to reclaim foundational values of the nation.

During Friday, April 9, a group of between between 70 and 80 was guided by a diverse and uniquely qualified group of speakers in an exploration and struggle with the challenge of framing and moblizing the reclamation project Horton described the night before. Of especial concertn was whether North Carolinians have either a special obligation or an organizational head start on seeding and nurturing such an effort from the grassroots.

On Saturday, April 10, a smaller, self-selected group worked in earnest to synthesize lessons and listening from the day before into an action plan and has charged a group to move forward on that task.

Additional details on that effort will be shared here, and youranalysis, commitment and feedback are welcome. Visit our contact page to offer these in the most constructive fashion.

Also welcome are images captured at the events. Audio and video of the conference are expected shortly and will also be shared here.

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Scorecard on Torture:
The Obama Administration's First Year

The Independent reprinted most of the Scorecard on Torture: The Obama Administration's First Year North Carolina Stop Torture Now (NCSTN) released during a February 2 press conference, where the group also announced new efforts to demand accountability for those who planned and piloted illegal flights of prisoners to secret torture facilities. The conference was also mentioned briefly in the Raleigh News & Observer and covered on Greensboro's Fox Channel 8 Web site.

Christina Cowger, NCSTN Coordinator noted in her comments that our organization's disappointment with the current administration’s first year of actions on torture " ... in no way suggests that we’re somehow attempting to exonerate the previous administration.  We are not trying to argue that current top officials are somehow mainly responsible for violations of international and national law."

"On the contrary – we are most disappointed with our current government precisely for failing to hold the previous administration accountable for barbaric and systematic use of torture," Cowger said.

The press conference followed on the heels of the Center for Constitutional Rights' announcement of their appeal of Maher Arar's complaint against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Arar is the survivor of a Canadian-American conspiracy to disappear him to Syrian torture chambers aboard a CIA-chartered aircraft, such as operated by Aero Contractors. Concurrent filing with the high court, the Center for Constitutional Rights called for citizens to demand that Attorney General Eric Holder to stop defending the Bush administration's wrongs.

Nearly one year after President Obama announced an end to U.S. torture policy and a commitment to shutter secret detention centers run by the CIA, Harper's reporter Scott Horton revealed that Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) continues to operate a black site less than one mile from the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and may have murdered three captives there during 2006.

Guantánamo Bay is yet home to 110 captives that a Justice Department task force has cleared for release.  Many of these men were sold into captivity by Afghani warlords or Pakistani informants.  Some of these men and many others were disappeared with the help of Aero Contractors' flyers.

Reverend Tom Rhodes, minister of the congregation that has hosted NCSTN for more than four years, opened the press conference.  Other featured speakers included Sarah Preston, Legislative Director, ACLU of North Carolina; and Chuck Fager, Director of the Quaker House, in Fayetteville near the Ft. Bragg headquarters of JSOC.

Cowger urged "North Carolinians to contact Attorney General Holder and ask that Maher Arar be issued a public apology, removed from the Terror Watch List, and receive compensation ... " from the U.S., as Canada has already provided.

Cowger also briefly revisited the history of our persistent, multifaceted, but -- so far largely fruitless -- struggle to convince elected representatives and community leaders of their responsibility to guard and promote our national security and integrity.

Accordingly, we are launching an effort to achieve accountability from the ground up.

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Irish allies worry extraordinary rendition continues under Obama administration

December 21, 2009 – Shannonwatch is concerned at the ongoing use of Shannon airport by companies and planes associated with the illegal US rendition program.

Since March 2009, five aircraft that have been identified by Amnesty International, the EU Parliament or other sources have been recorded there.

One of these planes, a Gulfstream IV with registration N478GS made news in early October when it was met by British military helicopters on a runway at Birmingham International Airport. Six days later it was at Shannon, thus reawakening the possibility that the airport is still facilitating kidnapping, disappearances and torture.

N478GS is registered to L-3 Integrated Systems, a Montana-based subsidiary of a US defense corporation. The parent company, L-3 Communications, is a multi-billion-dollar defense corporation based in New York whose clients include several US government departments. It is known that this Gulfstream jet, which was identified in a European Parliament report into the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects, is still very active around Europe. A report in the Guardian newspaper on 1 November of this year confirmed that it has been spotted at Glasgow Prestwick Airport and Stuttgart Airport in Germany, as well as Shannon.

Other rendition planes recorded at Shannon this year include N475LC, which is also owned by L-3 Integrated Systems, and a Gulfstream IV with registration N404AC which was identified by the Amnesty International report, Below the radar: Secret flights to torture and disappearance. N404AC visited Shannon on no less than four occasions in 2009 (2 April, 2 and 4 September, and 23 October.)

A Learjet with registration N54PA which has visited Guantánamo Bay on numerous occasions also continued to use Shannon in 2009. So too did N71PG, a plane registered to Phoenix Air Group, Inc. This is a private company permitted - until recently at least - to land in US military bases worldwide (the list of companies with these permits has not been made public in the last 3 years). N54PA is also operated by Phoenix but its registered owner is a company called VPC Planes of Wilmington, Delaware.

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Extraordinary Rendition, Disappearances & Torture:
Selected survivors' struggles for justice, in light of the Obama administration's resistance to the rule of law

As truthout.org reports:

On the heels of President Obama's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, the American Civil Liberties Union offered frank, focused and critical reaction to the President's professed commitment to the rule of law, human rights, and American values "not just when it is easy, but when it is hard."

"We're increasingly disappointed and alarmed by the current administration's stance on accountability for torture," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, during a conference call with reporters. "On every front, the [Obama] administration is actively obstructing accountability. This administration is shielding Bush administration officials from civil liability, criminal investigation and even public scrutiny for their role in authorizing torture."

Nobel laureate Obama is openly defiant of United States' obligations under the Convention Against Torture, by refusing to conduct a full investigation of extraordinary rendition, disappearance and torture of detainees. Indeed, Attorney General Eric Holder works actively to block lawsuits that demand release of torture evidence or seek civil penalties against officials implicated in the torture.

George Washington University Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley asserts that the Obama administration argues to reverse more than six decades of US legal precedents – dating back to the post-World War II Nuremberg trials – which held that legal wordsmiths who clear the way for war crimes share the guilt with the actual perpetrators.

BINYAM MOHAMED:

The Guardian / Observer (United Kingdom) reports:

A recently declassified legal opinion from US district judge reinforces British resident Binyam Mohamed's claim that he was tortured.

US District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ruling favorably on a writ of habeas corpus petition in the case of Saeed Farhi, a prisoner from Algeria who has been held at Guantánamo for almost eight years found that there was "credible" evidence that a British resident was tortured while being held on behalf of the CIA, and acknowledges that the US government does not dispute Mohamed was tortured while being held at "its behest."

Mohamed is fighting to prove that British authorities knew he was being subjected to torture and mistreatment.

Judge Kesslers's opion states: "Binyam Mohamed's trauma lasted two long years. During that time, he was physically and psychologically tortured. His genitals were mutilated. He was deprived of sleep and food. He was summarily transported from one foreign prison to another. Captors held him in stress positions for days at a time. He was forced to listen to piercingly loud music and the screams of other prisoners while locked in a pitch-black cell. All the while, he was forced to inculpate himself and others in plots to imperil Americans. The government does not dispute this evidence."

Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of the human rights group, Reprieve, described the US ruling as "another nail in the coffin of the British government's attempts to cover up" its role in Mohamed's treatment.

MAHER ARRAR:

November 2, 2009 — "When the history of this distinguished court is written, today's majority decision will be viewed with dismay," wrote Judge Guido Calabresi in his dissent from a 7-4 en banc opinion of the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

As Scott Horton reports for Harper's:

"In the Arar case, state secrecy claims are preposterous because the diplomatic and intelligence relationship that would supposedly have been compromised was that with Canada, and the Canadians had already come clean about what had happened and confessed to their own part in it, publishing a report as thick as two Manhattan telephone books. In this process, the Canadians behaved just like a modern democracy should. So it is not damage to relations with our neighbor to the North that is a concern. Rather, it is embarrassment of political figures in Washington."

AMIR MESHAL:

The Washington Post and The Public Record report:

On the heels of a the Second Circuit's ruling in Arar v. Ashcroft (above) that only Congress and the executive branch of government – not the courts – can interfere with government-sponsored extraordinary rendition, a US citizen from New Jersey seeks restitution from the US government for damages endured during his disappearnce and abuse in three different African natios over a period of four months.

Amir Meshal, 24, the son of Muslim immigrants from Egypt is represented by the ACLU, whose complaint alleges that Mesahal was arrested after fleeing hostilities in Somalia during 2006, secretly imprisoned in inhumane conditions, and subjected to harsh interrogations by US officials over 30 times in three different countries before ultimately being released four months later without charge.

"This case challenges the US government's effort to evade accountability for illegal detention and interrogations in counter-terrorism operations by masking and hiding its involvement," said Jonathan Hafetz, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.

According to the ACLU, Meshal was studying Islam in Mogadishu, Somalia, in December 2006, when hostilities broke out. With the airport disabled by bombing, Meshal fled to neighboring Kenya, where he wandered in the forest for three weeks seeking shelter and assistance before being arrested. Following his arrest, he was detained and repeatedly interrogated by U.S. officials who threatened to harm him, denied him access to counsel and accused him of receiving training from al-Qaeda, which Meshal denied.

Following his arrest and detention in Kenya, the suit says Meshal was illegally rendered to Somalia and then to Ethiopia where he was imprisoned in secret for over three months. There, US officials subjected him to harsh interrogations while denying him due process and access to a lawyer, his family or anyone else in the outside world.

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Please report broken links or other concerns.
updated 10 April 2010, JMcI

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