Blackwater and CIA Renditions

While Blackwater claims that “it is in effect an extension of the U.S. military because of its claimed status as part of the Pentagon’s ‘Total Force,’ Blackwater may actually have been far more intertwined with the workings of the military and intelligence agencies than it would ever let on.

Private Aviation Companies Render Prisoners Across the Globe

“The company [Blackwater] has multiple contracts with the U.S. government to provide pilots and aircraft. Information on the use of Blackwater’s planes by the government is difficult to obtain, but it has been well documented that U.S. intelligence agencies and the military have used private aviation companies to ‘render’ prisoners across the globe, particularly under the Bush administration ‘war on terror.’ Under the clandestine program, prisoners are sometimes flown to countries with questionable or terrible human rights records, where they are interrogated far from any oversight or due process. To avoid oversight, the government has used small private aviation companies – many with flimsy ownership documentation – to transport the prisoners. ‘Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet,’ wrote investigative journalist Jane Mayer in The New Yorker magazine. The plane has clearance to land at U.S. military bases. Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts.’ While there is nothing directly linking Blackwater to extraordinary renditions, there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence that bears closer scrutiny and investigation.” Blackwater, 253.

Air America Used for Covert Ops

“From 1962 to 1975, the CIA used its secretly owned airline Air America (which simultaneously functioned as a commercial airline) to conduct covert or secretive operations that would have sparked even more investigation and outrage if made public… 

Private Aircraft Transport Prisoners to Secret Prisons Around the Globe

“Decades later, the Bush administration, waging a war many compared to Vietnam, clearly saw the need for a clandestine fleet of planes. Shortly after 9/11, the administration started a program using a network of private planes some began referring to as the ‘new Air America.’ The rendition program kicked into high gear, as the United States began operating a sophisticated network of secret prisons and detention centers across the globe, using the private aircraft to transport prisoners.   

Most of the planes alleged to have been involved in renditions under the Bush administration’s war on terror were owned by shell companies. In contrast, Blackwater directly owns its aviation division and has been public and proud in promoting its military involvement.

Blackwater Aviation

“Blackwater Aviation was born in April 2003, as the Iraq occupation was getting under way, when the Prince Group acquired Aviation Worldwide Services (AWS) and its subsidiaries, including Presidential Airways. The AWS consortium had been brought together in early 2001 under the ownership of Tim Childrey and Richard Pere, who ‘focused on military training operations and aviation transport for the U. S. Government…

Blackwater-owned Planes

Frequent Airports Alleged

To Be Implicated in Rendition

Program

“Blackwater aircraft have made stopovers at Pinal Airpark in Arizona, which used to be home to the Air America Fleet. After the public scrutiny forced the CIA to dismantle its fleet and sell the airpark, a company called Evergreen International Aviation, whose board included the former head of CIA’s air operations subsequently purchased it….

“…Blackwater-owned planes frequented many airports alleged to be implicated in the rendition program.” –Blackwater, 255ff.

“’Typically, the CIA [planes will fly out of these rural airfields in North Carolina to Dulles,’ according to the authors of Torture Taxi.

“A glimpse of the flight records of planes registered to Blackwater subsidiaries Aviation Worldwide Services and Presidential airways revealed numerous flights that follow these patterns and frequent CIA-linked airports.” Blackwater, 256,257. [Our emphasis.] There follows documentation of 8 such examples of such aviation pattern in Blackwater.

Uzbekistan: Key Destination for

Military and CIA Renditions    

“In addition, though Blackwater’s aircraft in Afghanistan flew normal circuits, the company was also charged with flying out of the country, including to Uzbekistan…Uzbekistan has been one of the ‘key destinations’ for both U.S. military and CIA renditions. Prisoners are alleged to have been brought there both for interrogation and repatriation from Afghanistan. Also, as it happens, Blackwater’s planes in Afghanistan operate out of Bagram, a known U.S. –run detention and torture facility. According to Blackwater/Presidential’s Afghanistan contract, all personnel ‘are required to possess a Secret security clearance.’…

“Black” Contract With CIA

“Company president Gary Jackson has been bold in bragging of Blackwater’s ‘black’ and ‘secret’ contracts, which are not publicly available or traceable; he claimed these contracts were so secret he could not tell one federal agency about Blackwater’s work with another. Under the war on terror, Blackwater’s first security contract was a ‘black’ contract with the CIA, an agency with which it has deep ties. And then there was this development: In early 2005 [February 4, 2005], Blackwater hired the career CIA spy many believe was responsible for jump-starting the Bush administration’s post – 9/11 rendition program: J. Cofer Black, the former chief of the CIA’s counter terrorism center.” –Blackwater, 257, 258.

Legendary J. Cofer Black: Close Access

“Since 9/11, few people have had the kind of access to President Bush and covert ‘war on terror’ planning as Ambassador J. Cofer Black. A thirty-year CIA veteran, Black was a legendary figure in the shadowy world of international espionage.” –Blackwater, 261.  Black played a central role in the capture of the famed international terrorist, “Carlos the Jackal” in Sudan. After 9/11, having been marked for death by Osama bin Laden, “he enthusiastically seized a key role in plotting out the immediate U.S. response.” Two days after 9/11 Black was in the White House Situation Room, there to brief the President on the kind of campaign he had prepared for since joining the agency in 1974 but had been barred from carrying out.

Black’s Covert Action Dreams Become Reality

“Black found himself in the driver’s seat with a Commander in Chief ready and eager to make Black’s covert action dreams a reality.” –Blackwater, 269. “That September, President Bush gave the green light to Black and the CIA to begin inserting special operations forces into Afghanistan.” –Blackwater, 269. Black told his men to bring back Bin Laden’s head ‘in a box filled with dry ice.” –Blackwater, 269.

“Tenet [Director of the CIA] and his counter terror chief, Cofer Black, were at Camp David on Saturday, September 15, laying out a plan to send CIA officers into Afghanistan to work with the local warlords against Al Qaeda. The director returned to headquarters late Sunday and issued a proclamation to his troops: ‘We’re at war.’

The Dark Side: Secret Prisons for Torture

“The agency, as Cheney said that morning, went over to ‘the dark side.’ On Monday, September 17, President Bush issued a fourteen-page top-secret directive to Tenet and the CIA, ordering the agency to hunt, capture, imprison, and interrogate suspects around the world. It set no limits on what the agency could do. It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officers and contractors used techniques that included torture…

New Extraordinary Authority:

Turn Kidnapped Suspects Over to

Foreign Security Services for

Torture

“Bush gave the agency a new and extraordinary authority: to turn kidnapped suspects over to foreign security services for interrogation and torture, and to rely on the confession they extracted…

“Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and inside the American military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba. It handed over hundreds more prisoners off to the intelligence services in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Syria for interrogations.” Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize Winner of the New York Times for his work on secret national security programs, Legacy to Ashes: the History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday, 2007, p. 481. [Emphasis mine].

Covert Ops Relies Heavily on

Private Contractors

‘The covert operations Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied heavily on private contractors, answering directly to him, rather than active-duty military forces.” –Blackwater, 270.  Recruiting from former Delta Force, ex-SEALS, and other Special Forces operators as Independent Contractors, shortly Black had 1,200 men working for him.

The Camelot of Counter Terrorism

“It was the Camelot of counter terrorism,’ a former counter terrorism official told the Washington Post. ‘We didn’t have a mess with others-and it was fun.’ People were abducted from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hot spots and flown to the U.S. prison camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - most held without charge for years, designated as enemy combatants and denied access to any legal system. Others were kept at hellish prison camps inside Afghanistan and other countries.” –Blackwater, 270, 271.

Rendition Group Procedures

“As part of this new ‘operational flexibility,’ the CIA carried out ‘extraordinary renditions’ of prisoners – shipping them to countries with questionable or blatantly horrible human rights records, where they were sometimes psychologically or physically tortured. The Washington Post reported that Black’s CTC heavily utilized its ‘Rendition Group, made up of case workers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.’ According to the Post’s Dana Priest:

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a daylong trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA’s own secret prisons – referred to in classified documents as ‘black sites.’ which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe. –Dana Priest, “Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake German Citizen Released After Months in ‘Rendition,”’ the Washington Post, December 4, 2005.

“Black played an integral role from the very beginning in the use of ‘extraordinary renditions’ in the war on terror.” –Blackwater, 272. With the initial capture of alleged Al Qaeda trainer Ibn al-shayk al-Libi in November 2001, the FBI agent Jack Cloonan counseled his FBI agents to proceed just as if it were handled out of his New York FBI office: “Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights.” But this did not sit well with the CIA, which wanted to use other methods. “The CIA Afghanistan station chief asked Black, then counter terrorism chief, to arrange for agency to take control of Libi. Black in turn asked CIA Director George Tenet, who got permission for the rendition from the White House over the objections of FBI Director Robert Mueller.

White House Lawyers Work to

Develop Legal Justification for  

Ultraviolet Policies

‘The White House, meanwhile, had its lawyers feverishly working to develop legal justification for these ultraviolet policies. I ‘formally’ told the CIA it couldn’t be prosecuted for ‘torture lite’ techniques that did not result in ‘organ failure’ or ‘death.’ [Evan Thomas and Michael Hirsh, ‘Torture and Terror: Interrogators Have Pondered the Uses of Torture for Centuries and in the wake of 9/11 the US Has Embraced So-called Torture Lite,’ Newsweek, November 22, 2005.] Black had quickly earned an insider’s pass to the White House after 9/11, and his former colleagues said he would return from meetings at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. ‘inspired and talking in missionary terms.’ [Dana Priest, “Wrongful Imprisonment Anatomy of a CIA Mistake German Citizen Released After Months in ‘Rendition,’” the Washington Post, December 4, 2005.]” – Blackwater, 272, 273.

The Torture Papers

The memos created to justify torture would be released in the massive 1,249 pages The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Torture

The Pen of Inspiration records: “Dignitaries of the church studied, under Satan their master, to invent means to cause the greatest possible torture and not end the life of the victim.” GC 569.

“’Physical pain amounting to torture,’ Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee advised the Counsel to the President, Alberto Gonzales, ‘ must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.’” –Bybee to Gonzales, Anthony Lewis in the Introduction to The Torture Memos, xiii.

In other words, according to Bybee’s last definition, torture is not to be considered torture until the pain to the person is equivalent in intensity to pain causing death.

Ghost Prisoners

“Fanning out across Europe, Africa, and Asia, working with friendly foreign intelligence service on earth, CIA officers snatched and grabbed more than three thousand in more than one hundred countries in the year after 9/11.” –Legacy of Ashes, 485. As few as 14 were high-ranking authority figures within al Qaeda and its affiliates. Hundreds were nobodies who ‘became ghost prisoners in the war on terror.”  -Legacy of Ashes, 485.

Black: Coordinator for Counter Terrorism

In 2002, the CIA suddenly fired Black, kicked him out, and barred him from entering CIA headquarters. [UPI, July 28, 2004]. Black was humiliated and restricted to an agency satellite location at Tysons Corner. However, “On October 10, 2002, President Bush appointed him as his coordinator for counter terrorism, with the rank of at-large ambassador at the State Department.” [White House Press Release, October 10, 202.]” –Blackwater, 273.

Blackwater Hires Black: Direct

Access to CIA and Intelligence

World

February 4, 2005, Blackwater would hire Black, a man whom few could rival as having their hands deeply into the inner workings of U.S. covert operations in the post 9/11 world.  Soon Black became a ‘godfather of sorts to the mercenary community as it refined its rebranding campaign. Potential Blackwater clients could now assume they were getting direct access to the resources of the CIA and intelligence world from ‘a leadership team drawn from senior levels of the United States government’ – something few other private firms could boast or imply…He [Black] would soon take the lead in promoting Blackwater as a privatized peacekeeping force that could deploy at a moment’s notice in places like Darfur, Sudan, or domestically in U.S. Homeland Security operations.” –Blackwater, 280.

Total Intelligence Solutions Run

By Among the Best of the CIA’s

Officers

By 2007, Black set up Total Intelligence Solutions.

“Founded in February 2007, Total Intel [that’s total Intelligence Solutions] was run by Cofer Black – the chief of the CIA’s counter terrorist center on 9/11. His partners were Robert Richer, who had been the number two man at the clandestine service, and Enrique Prado, Black’s chief of counter terrorism operations. All three had decamped from the Bush administration’s war on terror in 2005 to join Blackwater USA, the politically wired private security company that served, among many other things, as the Praetorian Guard for Americans in Baghdad. They learned the tricks of the government-contracting trade at Blackwater, and within little more than a year Black and company were running Total Intel. These were among the best of the CIA’s officers.” – Legacy of Ashes, 512, 513. [Emphasis mine.]