Opinion
Officials should shed light on NC’s role in detainee renditions as shown in “The Torture Report”
“One of the hardest things for a country is to deal honestly with its negative past,” said Rep. David Price, D-NC. The same can apparently be said for the state of North Carolina.
Price was speaking at a Raleigh screening of “The Torture Report,” a new film about our nation’s unfinished business on torture. Our state’s torture business is also unfinished, and it’s disturbing that our elected leaders refuse to acknowledge this.
“The Torture Report” follows U.S. Senate Intelligence staffer Dan Jones, played by Adam Driver, as he learns the ugly truth of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. Jones and his colleagues eventually wrote the Senate “torture report,” concluding that the program was ineffective and grossly mismanaged by the CIA. They also concluded the CIA misled Congress, and the use of torture-tainted evidence made it virtually impossible to prosecute those responsible for 9/11.
Anyone who hasn’t yet seen “The Torture Report” should. The movie is hard to watch because it portrays CIA agents inflicting barbaric torture techniques on shaved, naked captives. It is doubly hard to watch because the classified 6,700-page Senate torture report still hasn’t even seen the light of day, except for a 525-page executive summary released in 2014. And North Carolina’s vital role in the CIA program is still shielded from public scrutiny by the inaction of our top law enforcement officials.
We are members of the non-governmental, blue-ribbon North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture. In 2017, we took on the challenge of investigating our state’s role in hosting “torture taxis” – the aircraft operating out of our public airports that flew the CIA’s prisoners to their torture chambers overseas.
For two years, we and our staff combed through public records on “renditions,” took testimony, and worked with experts at the UNC and Duke law schools. The result was an 83-page, extensively documented report, “Torture Flights: North Carolina’s Role in the CIA Rendition and Torture Program.”
We found that North Carolina infrastructure played a crucial role in the abuses depicted in “The Torture Report.” At least 49 prisoners were snatched overseas, gagged, and trussed in painful positions in aircraft operated for the CIA by Aero Contractors out of the Johnston County or Kinston airports. These 48 men and one pregnant woman, most of them unconnected to terrorism, were flown to locations specifically to be tortured. Altogether, fully half the known CIA rendition missions departed from and returned to North Carolina.
When Torture Flights was released in September 2018, we hoped that elected officials would read its findings and recommendations. Copies were hand-delivered to the Governor, the attorney general, the Johnston County district attorney, and the Johnston County commissioners.
As we explain in Torture Flights, our state has jurisdiction to prosecute North Carolinians who conspired in the CIA rendition and torture program. In fact, the state of North Carolina is obliged to investigate Aero Contractors and either prosecute or refer the results to the federal government — or at least to report Aero’s conduct to the federal government for investigation.
Enabling torture is not a record of which our state can be proud. Since the release of Torture Flights, hundreds of North Carolinians have begged our state government to ensure that this shameful role is not continuing.
Sadly, neither the governor nor the attorney general has responded.
A government that enables torture and does not hold itself accountable runs the risk of repeating that tragedy. Aero Contractors continues to operate without scrutiny from its specially fortified corner of the Johnston County Airport.
The trailer for “The Torture Report” says, “truth matters.” That certainly applies to our state’s torture taxis -- truth and justice both matter, and our elected officials should not be ignoring them.
The Torture Report film can be viewed on Amazon Prime.
Comments