The Village Voice - Oct 15, 2006
http://villagevoice.com/news/0642,torturetaxi,74732,2.html
Planespotting
Nerds with binoculars bust the CIA's torture taxis
by Trevor Paglen & A. C. Thompson
[Excerpted from TORTURE TAXI: On the Trail of the CIAs Rendition
Flights]
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...."
On the screen of Ray's laptop is a list of all the planes that his
"radar"
seesmost are commercial flights: Alaska Airways, Southwest, and so onand
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 jokemaybe 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., 1,000ft....
"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 scannera 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 planespotteror 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
Aeronuticas
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 friendsa
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 a
hold 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
papersthe
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 iswhat 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 Europewhich was soon released by Amnesty
InternationalJohn 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 no 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 programas 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 planthe 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.
