Black helicopters are part of a conspiracy theory that claims that special silent running "black" helicopters are used by secret agents of the New World Order, United Nations troops preparing to invade the United States of America, and/or the Men in Black. Parapsychologist John Keel has argued that this theory has similar origins to those regarding UFO's, ghosts and fairies; that they are part of modern mythology; in this case, representing a fear of the government and its technology.What follows would once have been firmly in the realm of black helicopter theory. But it is real.
Black helicopters without FAA-required running lights are regularly used by the drug interdiction office DEA. In addition, most US Army helicopters (such as the Black Hawk) are finished in a very dark chocolate or olive matt paint. With the progressive development of night vision goggles, the need for helicopters to be lit when moving as a planned formation has been reduced.
See also: TACMAR
in short, any farfetched theory concerning any government or other conspiracy, can be espoused by either those of right or left wing persuasions.
Noam Chomsky's theory about Soap operas being geared to lure women from politics sure is a black helicopter theory.
Extraordinary rendition, according to the ACLU in a document from 2005, is as follows:
Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where -- in the CIA's view -- federal and international legal safeguards do not apply. Suspects are detained and interrogated either by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. sovereign territory or, alternatively, are handed over to the custody of foreign agents for interrogation. In both instances, interrogation methods are employed that do not comport with federal and internationally recognized standards. This program is commonly known as "extraordinary rendition."The Washington Post dates the first renditions even further back than the Clinton administration. Excerpts:
The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically, with some experts estimating that 150 foreign nationals have been victims of rendition in the last few years alone. Foreign nationals suspected of terrorism have been transported to detention and interrogation facilities in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and elsewhere. In the words of former CIA agent Robert Baer: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt..."
...George W. Bush was still struggling to coax oil out of the ground when the United States "rendered to justice" its first suspect from abroad. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan authorized an operation that lured Lebanese hijacker Fawaz Younis to a boat off the coast of Cyprus, where FBI agents arrested him. (Younis had participated in the 1985 hijacking of a Jordanian plane and was implicated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which left a U.S. Navy diver dead.) President George H.W. Bush approved the kidnapping in 1990 of Mexican physician Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was believed to be involved in the torture and killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration official. Nothing says that renditions can involve only suspected terrorists; Israel's abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 could be called a rendition, though the term was not yet in use.The program received a new impetus and direction after 9/11. Excerpts:
Beginning in 1995, the Clinton administration turned up the speed with a full-fledged program to use rendition to disrupt terrorist plotting abroad. According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years...
The Key Events timeline begins less than one week after the attacks of 11 September 2001. On 17 September 2001, President Bush sent a 14-page memorandum to the Director of the CIA. While the exact contents of this memo are still classified, a summary has been declassified by the CIA: it pertains to the approval of ‘clandestine intelligence activity’, and it specifically contains an authorisation for the CIA’s ‘terrorist detention and interrogation program’.You can track the flights and locate the known prison sites here. The program has been used throughout the course of the war on terror with the collaboration of many US allies around the world. Excerpts:
Less than two months later, on 13 November 2001, President Bush issued an Executive Order on the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism. This Order provided the Pentagon with the authority to detain indefinitely any non-American in the world, in any place in the world, as long as they were determined by the US Government to pose a terrorist threat to US interests. Together with the September 2001 memo to the CIA, this Order laid the foundations for the development of a global system of rendition and secret detention, as well as the official military detentions in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Key Events timeline traces the significant events that have shaped this system in the years following these two directives...
Police in Scotland will look into allegations that CIA “extraordinary rendition” flights passed through airports in the country, they said Thursday.That report may be downloaded here. Key findings include:
Police will examine new research into the flights, in which people suspected of being terrorists by the United States were held covertly at undisclosed locations around the world without recourse to legal process.
According to a report published February by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a human rights advocacy group, as many as 54 nations aided the CIA's rendition and detention operations. It said more than 130 people were detained and detailed allegations of harsh treatment of some of the suspects...
...8. After being extraordinarily rendered by the United States to Egypt in 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under threat of torture at the hands of Egyptian officials, fabricated information relating to Iraq’s provision of chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda. In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on this fabricated information in his speech to the United Nations that made the case for war against Iraq.It's a program deep in the world of national security and the spy versus spy realm of secrets, so of course, speaking precisely about what's currently going on is difficult. But when people try, the results are not reassuring. Excerpts:
9. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times by the CIA. FBI interrogator Ali Soufan testified before Congress that he elicited “actionable intelligence” from Zubaydah using rapport-building techniques but that Zubaydah “shut down” after he was waterboarded.
10. Torture is prohibited in all circumstances under international law and allegations of torture must be investigated and criminally punished. The United States prosecuted Japanese interrogators for “waterboarding” U.S. prisoners during World War II.
11. On November 20, 2002, Gul Rahman froze to death in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan called the “Salt Pit,” after a CIA case officer ordered guards to strip him naked, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight without blankets.
12. Fatima Bouchar was abused by the CIA, and by persons believed to be Thai authorities, for several days in the Bangkok airport. Bouchar reported she was chained to a wall and not fed for five days, at a time when she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. After that she was extraordinarily rendered to Libya.
13. Syria was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects,” as were Egypt and Jordan. One Syrian prison facility contained individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins. Detainees report incidents of torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine (the “German chair”) and beatings.
14. Muhammed al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza, while seeking asylum in Sweden, were extraordinarily rendered to Egypt where they were tortured with shocks to their genitals. Al-Zery was also forced to lie on an electrified bed frame.
15. Abu Omar, an Italian resident, was abducted from the streets of Milan, extraordinarily rendered to Egypt, and secretly detained for fourteen months while Egyptian agents interrogated and tortured him by subjecting him to electric shocks. An Italian court convicted in absentia 22 CIA agents and one Air Force pilot for their roles in the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar.
16. Known black sites—secret prisons run by the CIA on foreign soil—existed in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand.
17. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was secretly detained in various black sites. While secretly detained in Poland, U.S. interrogators subjected al Nashiri to a mock execution with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded; racked a semi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them; held him in “standing stress positions;” and threatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.
18. President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order repudiating torture does not repudiate the CIA extraordinary rendition program. It was specifically crafted to preserve the CIA’s authority to detain terrorist suspects on a short-term, transitory basis prior to rendering them to another country for interrogation or trial...
...The use of renditions appears to have reached its apogee after the September 11 attacks, when President Bush expanded the program to include indefinite periods of detention in third-party countries, according to the report. While the Obama administration has taken measures to impose more oversight on the process, renditions appear to continue, according to the report.PBS's Frontline did a show on extraordinary rendition. Sometimes, the people who do the rendering are brought before a court. Sometimes. Excerpts:
President Obama issued an executive order 2009 that directed that the CIA close its secret detention facilities in order to “promote the safe, lawful, and humane treatment of individuals” held by the United States. But the order specified that the closures did not apply to facilities used to hold terror suspects “on a short-term, transitory basis.” A task force established by the order produced recommendations in 2009 that would allow rendition to continue, but with measures to prevent “the transfer of individuals to face torture.”
Due to continued secrecy over the CIA’s extraction and detention of suspects, estimates on the total number of detainees have been imprecise. The catalog of 136 people identified in the new report as detained or transferred by the CIA is the largest such list to be compiled to date. The report notes that the total number of people subject to rendition, detention, or interrogation will not be known until the countries involved release that information.
Countries assisting the United States included Afghanistan, Germany, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Kingdom. Some of the countries hosted facilities used by the CIA on their soil, according to the report, while others provided intelligence or aided in the capture, transport, or detention of individuals.
“The 54 governments basically enabled these operations,” Singh said. “Without the participation of these governments, the programs would not have been possible...”
On the crisp morning of Feb. 17, 2003, Abu Omar, a Muslim cleric in Milan, was walking near his mosque when a group of men suddenly grabbed him, tossed him in the back of a van, drove him to NATO's Aviano Air Base and flew him to Cairo, where he claims he was tortured for seven months.Oh, to be sure, many of those being taken are Al Qaeda folk, terrorists intent upon warfare with the rest of the world until all submit to their religion's supremacy. One might even call them enemies of humanity. And yet, what does it mean when that which was once unthinkable now is both done and rarely thought about? And with such a covert operation, what sort of guarantee do we have that all those who are made to disappear into prisons for indefinite detention are guilty of a crime, or aren't being vanished because of political motives? Such a system is probably unjust even in the hands of the good and honorable. Such a system in the hands of the venal, the evil, the power-hungry? It is not to be considered--yet consider it we must. The system exists. It is real.
On Friday, a Milan appeals court sentenced a former CIA station chief to seven years in jail, convicting him in the cleric's kidnapping, which was part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program. Two six-year sentences were also handed out to two American officials for the same crime.
Jeff Castelli, a former CIA station chief in Rome, along with Betnie Medero and Ralph Russomando, had been acquitted due to their dimplomatic immunity in the 2009 trial, while 23 other U.S. citizens were sentenced to prison in absentia...
Further leads for research:
- The Rendition Project
- Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
- Torture, Rendition, and other Abuses against Captives in US Custody
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