Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights

Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights
by Trevor Paglen, AC Thompson

Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights
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Book Summary Information

Author: AC Thompson, Trevor Paglen
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-09-24
ISBN: 1933633093
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Melville House

Book Reviews of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights

Book Review: Stunning.
Summary: 5 Stars

Trevor Paglen and A. C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (Melville House, 2006)

I can't remember the last time I read a general nonfiction book in the space of twenty-four hours; I'm not sure it's ever happened before. But I did it with this one (while at the same time blazing through a novel that was almost as good). And it's not because I know (if tangentially) one of the authors; it doesn't matter if you're my mom, if your book's unreadable, I'm not going to be able to read it. It's because Torture Taxi is a fast-paced, exceptionally well-written book.

I'm something of an egalitarian when it comes to reading; I can read about subjects that I know nothing or care nothing about-- or even actively dislike (cf. review of Richard Bak's Yankees Baseball, a sport I loathe)-- as long as the information is presented in an interesting way. I knew Paglen was capable of this long before he put pen to paper, as I was a big fan of his musical project Noisegate back in the day. One often wonders whether artists are capable of crossing media. In this case, it worked like a charm.

Torture Taxi, as the subtitle tells you, is a book about the CIA's Extraordinary Rendition program, a previously-secret initiative that was brought out into the open by regular folks around the globe who started wondering about the odd flight patterns of a certain group of planes. Using these, they tracked down ghost corporations, secret prisons, survivors of the program, and a host of scary, scary documents. This book, to be blunt, is a conspiracy theorist's most beautiful dream. I've never been a conspiracy theorist, but I've got to say that Paglen and his co-author, investigative journalist A. C. Thompson, make a very compelling-- and damning-- case that Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are only the tip of this polluted iceberg. They interview the survivors. They visit the sites. They quote, and sometimes show pictures of, the documents. The picture that emerges is not pretty.

This is a book that seems to have gotten very little notice. (Noisegate's music didn't, either, and that's equally criminal.) I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this, but I'm now going to attempt to change that, Torture Taxi is going to be one of the books I start recommending to everyone within earshot. Will likely find its way onto my ten best reads of the year list. **** ?

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Summary of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights


"We don't kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so that they can kick the shit out of them."-A U.S. official involved in CIA renditions

It's no longer a secret: Since 9/11, the CIA has quietly kidnapped more than a hundred people and detained them at prisons throughout the world. It is called "extraordinary rendition," and it is part of the largest U.S. clandestine operation since the end of the Cold War.

Some detainees have been taken to Egypt and Morocco to be tortured and interrogated. Others have been transported to secret CIA-run facilities in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, where they, too, have been tortured. Many of the kidnapped detainees have ended up at the U.S. detention camp at Guantnamo, but others have been disappeared entirely.

In this first book to systematically investigate extraordinary rendition, an award-winning investigative journalist and a "military geographer" explore the CIA program in a series of journeys that takes them around the world. They travel to suburban Massachusetts to profile a CIA front company that supplies the agency with airplanes; to Smithfield, North Carolina, to meet pilots who fly CIA aircraft; to the San Francisco suburbs to study with a "planespotter" who tracks the CIA's movements; and to Afghanistan, where the authors visit the notorious "Salt Pit" prison and meet released Afghan detainees.

They find that nearly five years after 9/11, the kidnappings have not stopped. On the contrary, the rendition program has been formalized, colluding with the military when necessary, and constantly changing its cover to remain hidden from sight.

Trevor Paglen is an expert on clandestine military installations. A widely exhibited artist and photographer, he is the author of the two-volume study Secret Bases, Secret Wars.

A.C. Thompson, winner of a 2005 George Polk Award, is a staff writer at the S.F. Weekly. He is a two-time winner of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency's PASS Award for crime reporting, and twice the recipient of the Western Publication Association's Maggie Award.

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