Sunday, December 23, 2007
Front Page
Activists link jets to secret missions
By Kevin Maurer, Staff writer
The silver Gulfstream
jet was barely visible as it descended out of the clouds over Fayetteville.
Chuck Fager stood under a
tree in the gravel parking lot near the runway, trying to stay cool in the
sweltering August heat. When he saw the dart-shaped plane with its swept
wings, he raced to the fence. Clutching a small point-and-shoot digital
camera, he started to snap pictures of the plane and its tail number —
N475LC — as it taxied to the Centurion Aviation Services terminal at
Fayetteville Regional Airport.
The plane was returning
from Crestview, Fla., near Eglin Air Force Base and Hurlburt Field, home of
Air Force special operations forces, according to flight records.
Fager is director
of Fayetteville’s Quaker House and an anti-war activist. He is also part of
a network of plane-spotters who are trying to shed light on a covert program
known as extraordinary rendition.
Extraordinary
rendition is a CIA practice of capturing and transporting suspected
terrorists for interrogation in countries that have lax rules on questioning
suspects.
The program
reportedly began under President Clinton, but under the Bush administration
the flights are alleged to have increased dramatically.
The Supreme Court
has ruled that the practice is permissible, according to The Associated
Press.
NC Stop Torture Now
and other anti-war groups have joined forces to track planes by tail numbers
and build extensive online databases of flight plans and owners. Fager was
at Fayetteville Regional Airport shooting pictures of the Centurion jet
because the network believes the company is supporting the CIA rendition
program.
"We believe that
Centurion is part of what we call the torture-industrial complex," Fager
said.
But company officials say
Fayetteville-based Centurion Aviation Services is just a private flight
service that supports L3 Communications, the sixth-largest defense
contractor in the world, which has operations in Fayetteville.
"Centurion has been
falsely implicated on several occasions regarding rendition or associated
flights," P.J. Wachtler, president of the company, said in an e-mail. "It
appears to me that the basis for the misinformation in these articles stems
directly from plane-spotter and conspiracy blog sites. It’s these types of
sites and open speculation that put my crews and aircraft directly at risk."
A message posted on an
Arabic Web forum called on Muslims to destroy all American Gulfstream and
Learjets, according to an April 2006 Transportation Security Administration
warning provided by Wachtler.
Centurion came to the
attention of Fager and other plane-spotters this summer when the company was
linked in the news and in parliamentary reports in Europe to rendition
flights.
NC Stop Torture Now has
focused most of its attention on Aero Contractors, a private company in
Johnston County also linked in media reports to the rendition program.
Germany indicted 13
Americans earlier this year, including pilots for Aero, in the 2004
kidnapping, detention and transport of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of
Lebanese descent.
El-Masri alleges that a
CIA black snatch team picked him up, and he was beaten, stripped naked and
drugged.
The snatch team flew him
to Afghanistan, where he was held for months before finally being released.
El-Masri sued the CIA, but the case was dismissed.
"It is un-American,"
Fager said of the rendition program. "You don’t treat children of God this
way. Americans don’t treat people this way."
While Aero Contractors
has received significant attention for alleged ties to rendition, Centurion
has stayed mostly out of the public eye.
A source familiar with
special operations aviation says that’s not surprising because Centurion has
no connection to any rendition flights.
"Anybody that would try
and claim otherwise is smoking crack," said the source.
The source said the
company is a taxi service. Its two Gulfstream IV jets — the model of the
plane spotted by Fager — cost close to $40 million each and are a favorite
of executives because of their comfortable cabin and long range. The jet’s
maximum range is about 5,000 nautical miles.
Trevor Paglen, author of
"Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights," thinks that
Centurion is likely the Joint Special Operations Command’s private airline.
The command oversees the secretive counterterrorist forces of the Army, Navy
and Air Force.
Ken McGraw, a spokesman
for the U.S. Special Operations Command at Tampa, Fla., said the aircraft do
not belong to U.S. Special Operations Command or its components.
"Centurion will have to
provide the information about who their customers are," he said.
Paglen points out that
Centurion is authorized to land at military bases to refuel.
Wachtler said in an
e-mail that L-3 Communications owns the jets. As a defense contractor, the
company needs access to military bases.
"As such, Centurion
applied for and received its civil landing permit by the (Defense
Department) to land at military bases. This is not an unusual process for
aviation companies," he said.
Centurion has 22
employees, Wachtler said, and has been operating since 2002.
Flight routes
He would not comment
on the company’s normal missions or frequent flight routes.
"We are obliged to
protect the privacy of our clients with regards to the nature of their
business," he said.
One of Centurion’s
Gulfstream IVs — tail number N478GS — has landed at Guantanamo Bay at least
four times and was seen in Cyprus, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, according to
Eurocontrol — the European counterpart to the FAA.
Fager said the planes
leaving Fayetteville usually fly to Bangor, Maine, then on to Shannon
Airport in Ireland and then disappear before coming back the same way.
The flight in August
originated in Crestview, Fla., which is home to Tepper Aviation Inc., Fager
said.
According to
Sourcewatch.org, (www.sourcewatch.org ) Tepper had
a long association with the CIA in the 1980s and 1990s, including flying
weapons into Angola to arm rebels.
SourceWatch is a
directory of people and organizations created by the Center for Media and
Democracy.
Wachtler said
Centurion has also never dealt with Tepper Aviation, an assertion confirmed
by Tepper Aviation officials. Wachtler said the plane in August was carrying
five L-3 Communication passengers to a meeting in Destin, Fla.
"We had to land at
Bob Sikes Airport in Crestview, Fla. since the Destin runway is too short to
land our G-IV," he said.
According to
airport officials, the runway at Destin/Fort Walton Beach Airport is long
enough to accommodate a G-IV. But Wachtler said in an e-mail Friday that
Centurion’s Operations Manual limits G-IV operations to runways that are at
least 6,000 feet long. Destin is just under 5,000 feet long.
Fager knows that
most of the Centurion flights he and other plane-spotters have documented
have not been returning from rendition missions. But he said he believes
they have established that the company is connected.
Fager said he wants a new
version of the Church Committee — a Senate panel that dug into CIA
activities in the 1970s. Only Congress, he said, can really shine a light on
rendition and who is involved.
"We’re not going to stop
it immediately," Fager said. "It is a long march. But we are moving toward a
time when somebody with a lot more clout says let’s take a look at this."
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Published on Monday
December 31, 2007
Op-Ed page
Centurion clarification
By Chuck Fager
Fayetteville
I’m grateful to the
Observer and reporter Kevin Maurer for opening a window onto Centurion
Aviation services ("Activists link jets to secret missions," Dec. 23), and
the secret world it inhabits, which adjoins everyday life in Fayetteville
like a parallel universe.
However, one
clarification is in order. The article’s subheading states that I charged
Centurion was "involved in extraordinary rendition," or kidnapping-torture
flights.
Centurion officials
vehemently denied making any rendition flights. They were backed up by an
unnamed source "familiar with special forces aviation," who insisted that
"anybody that would claim otherwise is smoking crack."
The subheading is less
than precise, however, and the denials miss their mark. My actual statement
in the article, cited accurately, was this:
"We believe that
Centurion is part of what we call the Torture Industrial complex."
What’s that?
The Torture Industrial
Complex includes a wide range of facilities and activities — it is by no
means limited only to kidnap-torture "rendition" flights.
Here are a few other
parts that we know of:
-- A far-flung network of secret
prisons and other "black sites," with interrogators, guards and support
staff. The Associated Press reported in 2006 that these secret sites hold as
many as 14,000 prisoners in a "legal vacuum."
-- Detailed planning and
logistics programs for the sites. The ACLU has filed suit against a
California travel planning company, Jeppeson Dataplan, for its part in
setting up torture-related flight plans.
-- Dozens of dummy front
companies scattered across the U.S. (Two at least in North Carolina; and
Centurion’s planes were owned by a third.)
-- Training for
"interrogators" who administer the torture, which this newspaper reported
last June had "migrated" from Fort Bragg to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and
likely other places in the secret network.
-- Psychiatrists and
doctors to design, refine, monitor — and cover up among their colleagues —
the "enhanced interrogation" torture techniques. Their active roles,
including personnel from Fort Bragg, have been confirmed by the Army in an
Inspector General’s report released last summer.
-- Lawyers and flacks to
pretend that torture is legal and moral, or to argue that in any case the
U.S. does not torture because if the U.S. does it, it can’t be torture.
Kudos to the Observer’s editorial writers for not falling for this
doublespeak.
-- Compliant media
outlets (not including this paper), to ignore this expanding reality.
-- And not least, given
the government-military context, there must be layers of clandestine
bureaucracy as well.Thus, there are many ways for a secret outfit like
Centurion to be related to the Torture Industrial Complex besides making
actual kidnap-rendition flights. So the company’s denials may be technically
true, but are beside the point.
Strictly by
accident, we have an instructive local example:
Centurion’s
Gulfstream N478GS flew from Bagram, Afghanistan, to Bucharest, Romania, in
late 2004. We know about this flight because N478GS crash-landed at
Bucharest, and crash reports were uncovered and reported by the Chicago
Tribune. (For that article,
click here.)
Investigators have
established the presence of secret U.S. prisons at both ends of this route.
So it is not a stretch to "connect these dots" with the Torture Industrial
Complex.
Planespotters
recently verified that Centurion’s N478GS is flying again, based in
Fayetteville.
Moreover, Centurion
flight logs obtained by NC Stop Torture Now document that many of their
flights land at one airport in England or Ireland, then drop from sight for
several days, only to reappear at a different airport for a return flight to
Fayetteville.
What other secret
Centurion missions are hidden in these blacked-out periods?
That’s a good
question, worth exploring further. Certainly Centurion is very busy these
days. In fact, as reported in this newspaper last June, it is even
expanding, planning a new hangar that will more than double the size of its
Fayetteville airport facility.
The company was
already one of the largest corporate taxpayers in Fayetteville. In 2005 it
ranked just below Wal-Mart, the city’s largest civilian employer, in tax
payments.
We hope reporting and
investigations of the Torture Industrial Complex will continue, in these
pages and elsewhere.
And, by the way, I don’t smoke crack.
Never have.
Chuck Fager is Director of Quaker House in Fayetteville, and is active with North Carolina Stop Torture Now.
Report: On Smithfield Protest >>
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