Planespotters are people whose hobby is to stand around outside of airports, sometimes in cold or blustery weather, and write down the tail numbers of planes they see taking off and landing.
Not your idea of a good time? Well, mine either, to tell the truth. But these people with their – ahem – unusual hobby have been at the center of an international controversy they have helped uncover that involves kidnappings and disappearances, secret prisons, and torture.
Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson are two journalists who have followed the planespotting story, which they have related in their book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights.
Despite the somewhat macabre title, the book provides a down-to-earth perspective on how planespotters helped break the story of the extraordinary rendition program.
While “spotting” planes and writing down their tail numbers is the basic idea behind this unusual hobby, not surprisingly it has in recent years acquired some high-tech twists.
Among these are the use of “virtual radar” systems, such as the Kinetic Avionics SBS-1 system that can be attached to a laptop with a USB cable. It can then “watch” air traffic within about a fifty mile radius by listening to call signs and other basic information about the planes. By scanning for something called ACARS, which stands for Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System, planespotters can download into their laptops the digital identification signal emitted by modern planes as they fly through the air.
But this is just the beginning of the story. From there, the hobbyists post their photos and other information to websites like Airliners.net or Planespotters.net, where the flight histories of specific planes can be pieced together.
The most enterprising of the hobbyists then begin to flesh out their understanding by comparing planespotting records against copies of the CALP, or Civil Air Landing Permits, a document that lists which civilian airline companies have clearances to land at military installations, and the names of the specific installations they’re cleared to land at.
Add to this further database and internet searches, perhaps some calls to journalists and public affairs officers at military bases and airports, and the beginnings of an outline of a secret program of substantial proportions begins to emerge.
One of the most interesting parts of the book relates how Paglen and Thompson follow a planespotter, whom they call “Ray,” as he practices his hobby out in the deserts of California and Nevada. There, Ray surveils a couple of remote desert airstrips called Base Camp and Desert Rock Airstrip that have hosted planes that have subsequently been seen in some of the most unsavory parts of the world, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan that sits adjacent to one of the most notorious of the CIA’s secret prisons, infamously known as the Salt Pit.
But perhaps the most intriguing part of the book relates a theory that Paglen and Thompson propose that states that in order for the secret overseas network of CIA prisons, aircraft, and airstrips to be able to operate, there needs to be a corresponding support infrastructure here in the United States. While this relationship does not need to be one-to-one, there nonetheless needs to be a supporting bureaucratic infrastructure of front companies as well as physical facilities like the Nevada Base Camp and Desert Rock Airstrip in the US for the whole system to be able to function.
While this is an interesting theory, the authors do not really explain in detail how this infrastructure might work, what it might look like, or most importantly, what advantage might be gained from understanding some of its inner workings.
Nonetheless, this idea of a corresponding domestic infrastructure being necessary to support government facilities overseas is one we will return to in greater detail in this blog within the next several weeks.
Journalism occurs in many different ways. But if the revelation of the extraordinary rendition program by journalists and hobbyists (among others) all using high-tech and often networked means illustrates anything, it is that we are entering a brave, new world where information – and those who purvey it – will have within their grasp unprecedented abilities to influence events and reveal what had previously remained hidden.
Torture Taxi is available at amazon.com.
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