Ghost Plane: The Untold Story of the CIA's Torture Programme.

• Author: Harding, Bruce
• Position: Book review

GHOST PLANE: The Untold Story of the CIA's Torture Programme

Author: Stephen Grey Published by: Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2007, 339pp, $35.

Stephen Grey is a London-based journalist and a former editor of the Sunday Times" Insight investigative team and has been that newspaper's home affairs reporter and a correspondent in South Asia, Europe and Iraq. His courageous sleuthing and reporting on the CIA's rendition programme won him the Amnesty International 2005 Media Award for Best Periodical Article; Grey's was declared runner-up 'story of the year' by the Foreign Press Association in 2004, and he has been short-listed for the 2006 Paul Foot Award for Investigative and Campaigning Journalism.

You have been warned: this is a deeply courageous and troubling expose of a deeply troubling US government programme by which torture has been procured by 'rendering' (spook jargon for capturing and transporting) 'ghost prisoners' either to their own homelands, to proxy allies of the United States or direct to Guantanamo Bay, as a key strategy in the war on terror. This book details the movements of a reconfigured CIA 'front airline' of jets (the new 'Air America') in a covert aviation network as these aircraft have moved into police states such as Egypt ('a passage to Cairo was a passage to the torture chamber', Grey observes sternly); and so when my review copy arrived just as I was due to fly to Cairo, I (weakly) decided to leave this book out of my carry-on luggage! It is quite a gutsy investigation into the founding of the rendition process in autocratic Egypt and supervised by then US Ambassador Walker in Cairo. Grey writes: 'The point was that, as everyone knew in a country like Egypt, the use of torture was endemic. It was highly unlikely that it would not be used'. The Egyptian torture programme began in January 1959 when Nasser rounded up and arrested 280 leading members of the Egyptian Communist Party and sent many to a brutal desert concentration camp (Abu Zabaal) and to military prisons, where several apparently died of torture. Another target was the Muslim Brotherhood [Ikhwan) of extremist Islamist theocrats who were linked to an attempted assassination of Nasser in 1954.

It is important to note that this 'policy of indirect action', of 'extraordinary rendition', was signed off by Sandy Berger (Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor), as what Berger cynically called 'a new art form'. This process was established formally by...