Elton John, 'The Captain and the Kid'

DATE October 19, 2006 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: British journalist Stephen Grey, author of "Ghost
Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program," talks about
the CIA rendition program that sends some terror suspects to other
countries to be imprisoned, interrogated and sometimes tortured
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

As part of America's war on terrorism, some of the terror suspects held by the
US have been transferred to other countries like Syria and Egypt to be
imprisoned, interrogated and sometimes tortured. This system has come to be
known as extraordinary rendition. My guest Stephen Grey has written a new
book about rendition called "Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture
Program." His reporting has broken new ground in the story, revealing how the
CIA flew prisoners to other countries. Grey is a regular contributor to the
Sunday Times of London and The New York Times, and formerly worked with the
Sunday Times of London investigative unit. He says that in the course of his
research, he interviewed CIA pilots who flew the prisoners, CIA operations
officers who held prisoners in their personal custody and CIA chiefs who
planned their rendition program. In addition, he spoke with White House
officials who authorized missions and former prisoners who say the US sent
them to other countries where they were tortured.

Stephen Grey, welcome to FRESH AIR. Before we get further into your
reporting, just describe what the rendition program is.

Mr. STEPHEN GREY: Well, the rendition program is a program to send prisoners
to places other than a court of law, back to the US courtroom, and it's been a
program developed since the mid-90s that has taken people across the world to
countries like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, all of which practice torture quite
regularly.

GROSS: So, it's as you put it, almost outsourcing prisoners to be tortured in
other countries so that we're not torturing them ourselves but they're still
being tortured on our behalf.

Mr. GREY: That's right. It doesn't always involve torture. It
doesn't--it's not always for the purpose of torture. But torture's been an
inevitable consequence of the program. Many in the CIA would defend it as a
way, if you like, of getting people off the streets, and Bush
himself--President Bush has described it as a way of taking terrorists out of
harm's way. But when you send people to a place like Egypt or Morocco or
Uzbekistan, where they boil prisoners alive, it's inevitable that these people
will be both mistreated and actually tortured.

GROSS: Can you give us a sense of the scope of rendition? How many countries
are involved? How many prisoners have been involved?

Mr. GREY: Well, it's difficult to estimate the numbers involved because the
CIA and the administration have refused to give any accounting of the people
that it captured. I mean, there are more than 6,000 people, for example,
captured in Afghanistan, dealt with there. They've only given figures for
perhaps 700 people who've been sent to Guantanamo. All the rest have
effectively disappeared. People in the CIA tell me it's in the low hundreds
of people sent to foreign countries like Egypt to Morocco Uzbekistan. I think
the figure's quite considerably more, probably double that, maybe five or 600.
And there have been other people that have been rendered by the Pentagon, by
the military, because they have a program which they call repatriation, but
effectively is rendition because it involves taking people without any kind of
hearing back to countries like Uzbekistan and Jordan, completely in secret and
without any judicial process, and that's the essence of rendition.

GROSS: You write that the rendition program actually started, not under
President Bush but under President Clinton, but that the program was used
differently under President Clinton than it has been used by President Bush.
Can you describe the differences?

Mr. GREY: That's right. Previously, in fact, since the 1880s, rendition was
about bringing people back to justice in the United States, you can snatch,
kidnap someone wherever you like, bring them back to the courtroom, and that
was OK. Under President Clinton the policy was invented of sending people to
third countries, to places like Egypt or Jordan, but the key thing then was,
according to the people who were involved, was that the people had to face
charges that they were actually wanted in Egypt, that they were going to be
dealt with according to the process of law. What happened after 9/11 was that
the policy was greatly expanded, the numbers were much greater, but also
people were being sent to countries where there were no charges against them,
where they had no connection at all, in fact. So the policy changed, really,
from being a policy of outsourcing of detention to what I think was a policy
of outsourcing of interrogation and outsourcing of torture.

GROSS: You discovered prisoners were being flown in executive jets to other
countries for imprisonment. How did you discover these exec--what do you mean
by executive jets?

Mr. GREY: Well, we're talking about the sort of plane used by high-flying
businessmen, rock stars, VIPs and politicians. Gulfstream jets and there's
even a Boeing business jet the size of a 737 you'd normally use for something
like the Rolling Stones to travel around. That's also been used by the CIA.
It really struck me that as a weird and quite surreal detail that prisoners
bound and gagged in shackles and these jumpsuits and manacled on their ankles
and wrists were being put in executive jets. It was quite an ostentatious
move by the agency to use these planes because they are quite well-noticed
where they go and sometimes were photographed by plane spotters in countries
they went to. It was a form of cover disguise that they presented this
airline as a taxi, a sort of VIP taxi that moved around the world, supposedly
taking around businessmen but in fact being used for the transfer of
detainees.

GROSS: How did you first find out that the CIA had this secret jet program
that it was using to fly prisoners to other countries?

Mr. GREY: Well, the story of my own understanding of rendition came really
after September 11th when I heard of this policy of rendition going on, this
secret transfer and I--funny enough, one of the first people to tell me was
Porter Goss, when he was congressman head of the House Intelligence Committee.
And then I went from that to be told by a source close to the CIA that when we
saw the camp at Guantanamo being created, that this was only the press
release, what they wanted you to see. These are prisoners being put into
public view, but beyond that, there was another world of prisons, and what he
said was it was connected together by this secret airline used by the CIA that
was taking people from one place to the other, so I was out there looking for
this airline, trying to work out how I could find out more because I saw that
as a way of connecting the dots, and the jets, if you like, were the link that
demonstrated the fact that it was an overall system being operated globally.

GROSS: One of the things that helped you put together the story of this
secret plane transportation network that the CIA was using the transport the
prisoners was plane spotters. You worked with plane spotters and with their
logs to help you figure out what the planes were and where they were going.
What are plane spotters and how did you use them?

Mr. GREY: Yes. I think people have often seen this story about plane
spotting. I think it's been a little bit exaggerated because it's quite easy
to tell a story of these strange people clustered around airports. They're
very common in Europe actually, people as a hobby stand around outside
airports and take photographs of planes as they come and go. I actually
started not with plane spotters but by finding a source that provided me with
details. He was connected to the European Aviation Industry, and he provided
me with details of the movement of these jets around the place. I ended up
with thousands of flight logs of these planes around. The role that plane
spotters played was that all this while they'd been taking photographs, pretty
much any plane that turned up, in all kinds of airports around the globe, and
what we found was that once we had identified the planes the CIA was using,
you could look on the Internet where all these photographs were placed by
these plane spotters and find amazingly that all these photographs of the
presence of these planes in all these airports at exactly when these flight
logs said they were, they really proved what they were saying, and it was a
kind of time-coded stamp of information showing that these planes were really
there.

GROSS: And then you were able to use these logs that you had gathered and the
plane spotting information and match that with what former prisoners were
telling you about when and where they were flown to other countries.

Mr. GREY: That's right. I mean, you take someone like Khalid el-Masri. He
was a German citizen. He was captured in Macedonia--that's in eastern
Europe--and was flown, he said, to a secret prison in Afghanistan where he was
interrogated by the CIA and held for about five months without charge before
being released in the mountains of Albania where he wandered to a police
control--a border control post and was flown home. Now his story was so
incredible that for months, no one believed what he had to say. He told his
story to all kinds of people, and everyone said, `Surely this guy's some kind
of--either a crazy or an Islamic militant that we shouldn't believe.'

What was important was when we looked at the flight plans, quite incredibly on
exactly the same day at the same time as he said he'd been transferred from
the capital of Macedonia, Skopje, to Afghanistan, there was this same CIA 737
jet arriving from Majorca, an Spanish island, to Macedonia and then flying
onwards to Kabul, Afghanistan. So it really gave great authenticity to his
claims. And after we traced the movements of this jet, taking el-Masri to
Afghanistan, one of the other clues that was thrown out was to go back and
look at where this plane had been, and I went back to some of its
destinations, including this island of Majorca, where it turned out that the
plane was quite a regular visitor, and it seemed there were various places in
the world that the CIA was using as a base for these rendition operations.
The biggest one was actually in Germany, Frankfurt airport. Great Britain was
used as well.

Often these rendition flights were started from these places, and what
happened is once I reported the fact that the plane was regularly going to the
island of Majorca, there was local pressure there. There was a Spanish police
inquiry that took all kinds of evidence. Looked at hotel records, all the
flights there, documents that had been around at the airport and actually
identified the names of the crew on-board this plane, both the pilots and the
air crew and the members of the rendition team, and that now has led to all
kinds of further investigations in Europe.

There's now a police inquiry in Spain, but also more importantly in Germany
where they're investigating that case as a case of kidnap, and it looks like
in the next few weeks they will actually issue arrest warrants for some of the
people on-board that plane. So the trail, if you liked, led from one thing to
another. And in Europe, these renditions, because they'd been done without
any judicial control, are regarded as kidnap, and that's why this story, if
you like, is going to continue and continue because there are very serious
prosecutors and magistrates in Europe seeking to bring charges against people
in the US for carrying out these renditions.

GROSS: You have done an incredible job uncovering the secret flights that
took the prisoners to other countries. Are you confident that you're doing
the right thing in uncovering this? I mean, you know, it's a secret program
because it's part of the war on terror. It's, you know, a CIA-run program.
It's the CIA's job to keep this program secret. Maybe we'd be safer if you
hadn't uncovered it and reported it. I mean, are you confident you're doing
the right thing?

Mr. GREY: Yes, I am confident I'm doing the right thing. I've been very
careful in the way that I've reported this. These flight logs that I obtained
almost three years ago, I'm only publishing now. I'm not publishing current
information about active operations. I've not published the real names of any
CIA operatives, even though, quite often they've left very clear clues as to
who they are.

A few months ago, John Bellinger, the State Department legal adviser, went to
Geneva to the UN committee on torture, and he told the world how the US was
committed to the fight against torture, quite rightly, and he said that people
who were victims of torture have the right to complain. Now anyone who tries
to sue the United States for being tortured--for rendition at the moment--are
being told in a legal defense from the government that these matters are state
secrets and to reveal any details of rendition will be against the state's
interests, so that there's actually no way for these people to complain. I
think it's important that the facts of the program are set straight.

Our relationship with these countries, these dictatorships colors the way that
the whole war on terror is viewed in the rest of the world, and if this war
can be won, if Islamic extremism can be fought, then I think it's important
that people view the promises of the United States and other democratic
countries of spreading human rights, of spreading democracy, they view those
promises as credible and real, and I think it's important to expose what's
been going on, the hypocrisy if you like, of policies that have totally
contradicted both of those promises.

GROSS: My guest is Stephen Grey, author of the new book, "Ghost Plane: The
True Story of the CIA Torture Program."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Let's get back to our interview with Stephen Grey, author of the new
book, "Ghost Plane," about rendition, the CIA program that has sent some
terror suspects to other countries to be imprisoned, interrogated and
sometimes tortured. He uncovered the story of the CIA planes that transported
the prisoners. He says the flight logs he's published are old, and he's been
careful not to publish information about current operation.

You say that you've been very careful and all the logs you're exposing are old
logs from several years ago, but now that we know how you got those logs and
now we know about the plane spotters and about the fact that these secret CIA
logs exist, can't other people find the information, too, about more current
flights and can perhaps even people in terrorist networks find that
information, too?

Mr. GREY: Yes. Since I got hold of a lot of this information, a number of
things have changed, and I think that some of the loopholes that allowed us to
find this information--it was very sloppily put together, the whole
network--but some of the planes have changed, some of the ways it's been done
have changed. I don't think it's possible to follow these planes in quite the
same way as they were done before.

But we're dealing here with a policy of denial. It's taken a very, very long
time. I've been writing about the subject since May of 2004, and it took a
very, very long time for anyone in the administration to confirm, to answer
questions about this policy of rendition. Even now, as I mentioned to you
before, there are hundreds of prisoners that were captured who've just
disappeared off the face of the earth, and I think it's very important that we
don't have a policy of disappearance and we account for what's happened to
people. And one of the reasons I'm actually publishing these flight plans is
I want to see if we can trace where these prisoners have gone and what's been
happening.

Now I'm not trying to sort of take a sort of high moral position where you
should say, `You shouldn't send people to Uzbekistan ever, you shouldn't work
with these dictators,' because sometimes you need to in a broad war like the
one that's going on at the moment. But you need to verify what's going on,
and one of the difficulties is because this policy has been conducted in such
utter secrecy, there's no way to check on what's happened to these people.
They've disappeared into this world of prisons from which we may never see
them again. I think that it's very important to shed light on everything and
that way we can actually check that these people have not been executed or
tortured indefinitely.

GROSS: Now you've traced some of the places that prisoners in the rendition
program were flown to and what happened to them there. One of the countries
that has been participating in this program is Syria. It's actually very
interesting that the United States should have this cooperative relationship
with Syria in the rendition program when the US would not negotiate with Syria
during the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Why do you think that the United
States and Syria had been cooperating secretly in the rendition program but
the US was unwilling to talk with Syria about the war?

Mr. GREY: I think you've hit the nail on the head. The point is that they
were secret. If this had been public, it would have been deeply embarrassing
for the administration because the criticisms of Syria by the United States
are well-known. First of all, the way it shelters terrorists who are carrying
out attacks within Israel. And, second, its own human rights record and its
lack of democracy and more recently some of the way the fight against the
United States in Iraq has been coming across the border. So the relationship
with Syria has been very pragmatic and very secretive because it's always been
an issue that this whole thing might backfire. What's happened is that there
was a very intense relationship in the months after September 11th, and that
carried on for a couple of years. I think it's probably petered out, this
secret relationship since the Iraq war when relations really took a turn for
the worse.

But it's really striking that really important prisoners were sent to Syria by
the United States, and it really underlines the whole basis of this rendition
program. There's a prisoner called Mohammed Haydar Zammar. Now he was one of
the people who according to the 9/11 commission was probably one of the ones
who helped recruit the Hamburg cell that carried out the attacks on the twin
towers. Now he was a really important prisoner. He was captured in Morocco
after a tip-off from the Germans--he's a German citizen--in December of 2001.
Now at the time, he was one of the first prisoners associated with the 9/11
attack to actually be in custody.

Now you'd have thought that prisoner would have been someone the US would have
wanted to hold themselves because that was really what the investigation into
the September 11th attack was about, to get people like him. But instead, and
I've got a German intelligence report that confirms this, he was sent on
December 27th, 2001, directly into the hands of the Syrians. Now he wasn't a
Syrian citizen. He'd been born there, gone to Germany when he was five years
old. He should have been sent back to Germany according to normal legal
procedures. But he was sent to Syria, and what's more, the CIA said to the
Germans, `If you've got any questions you want to ask Zammar, give them to us,
and we'll pass them on to the Syrians.' So it showed the way that the CIA was
continuing to be part of the interrogation process. I don't know if they were
actually in the cell when he was being tortured.

GROSS: Do you know for sure that he was tortured?

Mr. GREY: I'm absolutely certain that he was tortured. He was held in the
Palestine Branch, which is an absolutely notorious torture center. He was
held in a cell, like all the prisoners, in one part of the jail. It's known
as `the grave,' where the cells are the width and length of coffins,
three-foot-by-six-foot. He was taller than six foot. He wouldn't actually
fit in that cell without bending his body, and he was held there for months
and months. I spoke to three other prisoners who were in that part of the
prison at the same time who heard his screams as he was being beaten and were
able to communicate a little bit with him, but they had to do that when the
guards were out of the way.

GROSS: Stephen Grey is the author of the new book, "Ghost Plane: The True
Story of the CIA Torture Program." He's a regular contributor to The Sunday
Times of London and The New York Times. He'll be back in the second half of
the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Stephen Grey, author of
the new book, "Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program." It's
about extraordinary rendition, the program in which the CIA sent terror
suspects to other countries, like Syria and Egypt, to be imprisoned
interrogated and sometimes tortured. One example of rendition is Mohammed
Haydar Zammar, who the US sent to Syria, where, Grey says, he was tortured.
Zammar is suspected of recruiting the Hamburg cell that carried out the
attacks on the World Trade Center.

What does Syria get for cooperating with the United States in accepting
prisoners like Zammar?

Mr. GREY: For Syria, this whole relationship was a boon. It was very
important. First of all, you had a new president, Bashar, who wanted to try
and re-establish some relations with the West. This was one way of doing it.
They got some protection while this was going on from real criticisms about
what they're up to domestically and the way they'd clamped down on opposition.
At the very time that these renditions were going on, Syria had a resurgence
of opposition--they called it Damascus Spring--and it had been brutally
crushed. They'd arrested everyone within sight who was involved with that,
and there was very little opposition from the West about that. But most
importantly, the type of people who had been rendered to Syria, had been sent
to Syria, were the Syrian regime's own domestic opponents. The Syrian regime
has waged a campaign for years against the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist
groups, and they saw this as an opportunity for an alliance with the United
States, whereby they could pass details of their dissidents around the world
in the hope that some of these people would be captured and brought back to
them. So it was very, very useful.

I mean, in the Zammar case, you also see quite interestingly in Morocco, he
was captured in Morocco and then sent to Syria, but there's a note mentioned
in this German intelligence report that I found which says that the United
States asked Germany to put pressure on the European Union to withdraw
complaints over human rights over the handling of Mr. Zammar's arrest in
Morocco. So you see the way, and that was because of Morocco's contribution
to the fight against terrorism. So you can see the trade-off there. That's
just an example from another country where, according to this German report,
the United States was saying, `Back off on complaints about human rights
because this country's helping us with the fight against terrorism.'

GROSS: One of the people who was sent to a Syrian prison by the United States
is Maher Arar. Now he's Canadian, and he was deported to Syria from New York.
A Canadian report recently was published which said that there is no evidence
that he was involved in terrorism. Tell us a little bit about his story and
where he fits into the larger story that you've reported on.

Mr. GREY: Well, he was one of the most compelling cases to me because from
the very first time I met him in October 2003, I found him to be a very, very
credible person, who just seemed to me, you know, a decent person, the sort of
person that has always been welcomed in the United States and Canada, and I
couldn't see any reason why he should be regarded as a dangerous threat. And
he described with great openness what happened to him and how he was picked
up. He was changing planes as he returned home to Canada. He changed planes
at John F. Kennedy Airport. Taken arrested by the FBI, held for a few days
in the Brooklyn Detention Center and then sent in one of these executive
planes first to Jordan and then transported by road to Syria, and he was one
of the first people who described this torture center in Syria, the Palestine
Branch, and he too was held in a cell the size of a coffin. And it's also
quite striking when there's all this discussion about torture methods to hear
what it was like, to be in the situation. Now he was beaten the first few
weeks he was held, and that was, if you like, the physical torture.

But you know, the worst thing for him was to be held in this cell the size of
a coffin, where he couldn't bend more than one direction. He could bend
towards the door. If he wanted to pray to Mecca, because he's a Muslim, he
wouldn't have the opportunity because he could only bend in one direction. He
was held in that same cell for 10 months and 10 days, and the psychological
horror of this solitary confinement in this tiny space without light really
struck me as one of the most important things.

And you know when I refer to some of this as a program of torture, I'm not
just talking about, you know, physical methods. I think that someone like him
who was told--there was no charge against him. He was held indefinitely, and
he was released after pressure. And when you see people like that, held for
months and months and months without trial, a tunnel with no light at the end,
being sent with no concrete charges against him, it's that psychological
situation therein that makes me regard this whole system as a system of
torture. It's not just the physical methods of torture.

GROSS: One of the basic questions surrounding the rendition program is: Does
torture even work? You know, even if you take aside the human rights issue,
just on a practical level, do you get reliable information from torture?
You've tried to kind of take stock of what we know, about what people have
confessed under torture and how much of that has been true and how much of
that was just said in the hopes of stopping the torture. So can you assess
for us based on what you know, based on what you've been able to research,
what information we've actually gotten from torture?

Mr. GREY: I would argue that torture can work. I don't try to make a
position whereby you say that if people are tortured, they'll never say true
things. It can be a way of finding out the truth. Problem is, quite often,
people will make things up under torture. They're very likely to. They will
say anything under torture. The difficulty is separating out what's true and
what's false. If you look at the cases since September 11th, there are
probably people who have cracked under torture and told truthful information.
People like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah to leading al-Qaeda
operatives. There are others like Ibn Sheikh al-Libbi. He was rendered to
Egypt. He was tortured there and he provided information that Saddam Hussein
was linked to al-Qaeda. That there was this relationship between Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda. It was one of the arguments used in a speech by Colin
Powell before the United Nations to justify the war in Iraq. Now that
information proved to be totally false. It was extracted under torture, and
yet it was one of the arguments to justify the war. And that was a prime
example of one of the dangerous results of using evidence gained under
torture.

GROSS: One of the things you did for your research for this book and for
articles you've written is to talk to people who were prisoners in this
rendition program and claim to have been tortured. And I'm wondering how much
you trust their versions of their stories of imprisonment and what you can do
to back those up to see whether the prisoners are telling you the truth about
how they were treated.

Mr. GREY: I treat everyone differently and try to assess what they're saying
and do my best to assess the truthfulness of what they argue. Some people are
still in Guantanamo, for example, and made their stories via lawyers and
written statements, and all one can do is go out and check the information
they've given and see whether it's credible, and I mentioned the use of the
flight logs to see whether their account that they had been, you know, sent
from one particular prison to the other was true or not. I've done that.
Assessing whether people have been tortured, that actual physical methods have
been used on them is very difficult because the very best torturers and the
most egregious torturers are also very good at torturing without leaving
significant marks. But what you do see is that there are two parts of this
process of rendition, the two promises that are made. One is to not to
torture people. The other thing is to a fair trial to face charges when you
send someone to a country like Egypt. And what you can see quite clearly is
that the second part of the promise has definitely not been fulfilled. By
far, the majority of people sent to these countries have not been brought to
any form of trial. In fact, some of the very first renditions that took place
in the mid-90s from Albania was under President Clinton. They were sent to
Egypt and two of the people involved were actually hanged without any trial
for the offenses they'd committed. And it was a very clear case of the breach
of the promises that had been made from the very beginning of the rendition
program, that the promises were not taken very seriously.

One of the things we've heard a lot about, particularly from the defense
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is that terrorists are train to lie and they're
trained to allege torture, and in fact there is a manual that was seized from
some al-Qaeda operatives that talks about, you know, talking about torture
when you've been arrested, and that's true, people can invent these tales.
But I've found that actually the people I've seen who describe these things
are actually very credible, and one of the surprising things actually is that
people often underrate what happened to them. They're not building up the
story. They're very, very quiet in the way they describe things, where they
could have alleged physical torture, where they could have alleged, you know,
being stretched and beaten and given electric shocks, many people say, `No,
this is what happened to me. It wasn't as bad as some people have said. This
is what happened to me. It was extreme psychological torture, but it--you
know, I didn't get the electric shock, you know.' I've actually--when I've
encountered some of these people, I'm often very surprised by the modesty of
their claims, which seems to me goes against this image that the defense
secretary has been portraying.

GROSS: My guest is Stephen Grey. His new book is called "Ghost Plane: The
True Story of the CIA Torture Program."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Stephen Grey. His new book, "Ghost Plane," is about
rendition, the system in which the US has sent terrorism suspects to other
countries to be imprisoned, interrogated and sometimes tortured.

The Council of Europe's Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee recently
released a report that pertains to what we're talking about. Tell us what the
Council of Europe is and the importance of this report.

Mr. GREY: Well, the Council of Europe is the body that polices the European
Convention Against Human Rights, which is a significant piece of legislation
encouraged actually by the United States, which extends across the European
Union but also the new allies in East Europe, and that includes Russia as
well. So it is a body that has quite wide powers, in fact, to ask questions
around the continent. And its conclusion from its inquiry was indeed that
this rendition policy was going on, that European airspace and European bases
were being used for rendition, but most importantly that it was illegal, the
whole policy was illegal.

GROSS: And what kind of follow-up do you think there'll be on that report?

Mr. GREY: Well, I think it puts the emphasis on European governments to
investigate what's been happening in their back yard. What's the policy that
most European countries have taken is that rendition is something they know
nothing about and when it's been reported that all these planes involved in
rendition have been making widespread use of their airports and airspace that,
oh, it's all news to them, they didn't know it was happening. What the
Council of Europe report does is explain quite clearly in an official way that
this program is going on, and it involves the cooperation of Europe. So from
now on, European governments are going to be investigating these matters and
will actually demand permission from the United States before use is made of
their facilities to carry out those operations. So I think the Council of
Europe report, among other inquiries going on in Europe, will actually
significantly disrupt these operations from continuing.

GROSS: This week President Bush signed legislation that creates new rules for
interrogating and prosecuting terror suspects. Would you describe this
legislation?

Mr. GREY: Well, I think there's some good aspects to the legislation. It
does actually strengthen the trial procedure. It's bringing people to trial
at last rather than being held in secret jails. But in some ways it's very
skewed. What it's doing is providing rights to the worst terrorists in jail,
people like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the September 11th
attack. It's right that he should be brought to trial at last. What's skewed
about this is that it leaves all the hundreds of other prisoners, if not
thousands, that have been captured in a kind of limbo. It provides a means of
trial but it doesn't actually say that people have to be brought to that
trial. People can be held indefinitely now, much wider definition of enemy
combatant that's being created.

So what I wonder is what is going to happen to all the people who have been
rendered to these different countries, people who are being held secretly.
There's lots of key prisoners that are just totally missing. And what's being
done in this legislation is to remove the right of legal challenge, of habeas
corpus, from any prisoner being held by the United States around the world, so
that in a stroke, it removes almost the main way of actually finding out
what's happened to all these disappeared people. So some positive elements to
it, but overall, I think it's quite a regressive measure.

GROSS: The president in this legislation gets to establish what interrogation
techniques are permissible. How is he supposed to do that? Would you explain
that part of the legislation?

Mr. GREY: Well, he's supposed to take into account the Geneva Convention. I
mean, one positive aspect of this is that one of the things people don't often
realize is that when President Bush said that they would in general follow the
Geneva Conventions after September 11 and would treat people humanely--the
phrase was "humanely"--there was specific exemption given to the CIA whereby
the CIA did not have to treat people humanely, and that's where some of the
more aggressive torture techniques were developed without exemption. That's
been removed, and he has to provide standards of what is humane. According to
the Geneva Conventions, cruel treatment is not allowed. But leaving it in the
hands of the president is quite surprising. You have to remember that what
people call humane is quite different in different cases. For example, there
was a prisoner held in Guantanamo, Khatani, and he was treated abysmally. He
was deprived of sleep, held in hot and cold treatments, sexually taunted,
there was blood smeared over him, he was threatened with dogs. It's difficult
to imagine that that treatment would, by any normal person, be called `humane'
treatment, and yet an unofficial inquiry called that `humane.' So you wonder
if certain treatments like that are called humane, really, what may still be
justified despite these new rules.

GROSS: Will this new legislation affect the rendition program?

Mr. GREY: Yes, it will affect the rendition program. It will permit it and
help it to continue, because as I said, it allows for indefinite detention, it
allows a wider definition of an enemy combatant, it allows no means for the
prisoners to be transferred--for prisoners to challenge their detention in any
US courtroom. And by placing greater restrictions on the CIA's own methods of
interrogation, it will create an even greater temptation to outsource that
interrogation, to essentially hide these prisoners in foreign jails and in
foreign custody. So I actually think it's going to increase the likelihood of
more renditions going on.

GROSS: Are there any challenges planned to the rendition program?

Mr. GREY: Yes, I think one of the main problems in the rendition program is
that across the world, people are protesting about it. I think--in Europe
there are prosecutions planned of some of the people involved. There are
legal challenges ongoing in the United States. Maher Arar, who was sent to
Syria from John F. Kennedy Airport, the Canadian. He's suing the United
States. He's lost the first battle of that court case, but he's appealing,
and that may continue. But I think more importantly, there's strong political
pressure from many of America's allies that if these renditions occur, they
need to be put in a legal frame. There needs to be a way of verifying that
the treatment these prisoners get when they're sent to other countries is
fair, they're brought to open trial and are not tortured, and I've seen very
high-ranking intelligence officials in other countries, for example, the man
who was until just recently the head of British Intelligence, MI6, Sir Richard
Dearlove, said quite recently that this whole process of rendition among other
policies was killing the ability of Western intelligence agencies to recruit
Islamist people inside some of the Islamic militant organizations to work for
them because the policies that were being pursued, like rendition, were so
abhorrent, the people no longer saw the United States and Britain as
ideologically on the right side. It's hampering our overall intelligence
effort. And there will be pressure from people like that to try and bring
this whole policy into line.

GROSS: Stephen Grey, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. GREY: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Stephen Grey is the author of "Ghost Plane." He's a regular
contributor to The New York Times and The Sunday Times of London.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Elton John's new album,
"The Captain and the Kid"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Elton John has conceived his new album, "The Captain and the Kid," as a sequel
to the 1975 album, "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy." Working with
his long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin, Elton John picks up that concept album's
loose steam of a couple of artists who struggle and begin to succeed and
brings it up to date. Rock critic Ken Tucker says "The Captain and the Kid"
is an artistic success beyond the terms John and Taupin set for themselves.

(Soundbite from "Just Like Noah's Ark")

Mr. ELTON JOHN: (Singing) "It's just like Noah's ark. There's two of every
kind. Pretty girls and boys in drag walking a fine thin line, shaking hands
and bussing cheeks. Licking their lips like they could eat me alive in a
couple of weeks. Yeah, just like Noah's ark."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. KEN TUCKER: Richard Nixon, Godzilla, Tennessee Williams, Donald Duck,
John Lennon, the Big Bad Wolf and the Beach Boys are all invoked on "The
Captain and the Kid." Bernie Taupin's lyrics to Elton John's melodies have
long traded on pop culture imagery as shortcuts to mood and message. The Judy
Garland melancholy of "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" is only the most famous
example by this duo. Where stuffing songs with familiar names is, in others,
frequently a sign of lazy songcraft, for Taupin, it helps him organize his
thoughts and sharpen his points.

(Soundbite of "Postcards from Richard Nixon")

Mr. JOHN: (Singing) "We heard Richard Nixon say, welcome to the USA. The
common sense I sometimes lack has opened up a seismic crack. We've fallen in
and I can't pull back. And I guess we'll have to stay. In open arms, we put
our trust they put us on a big red bus..."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: As we can hear, Elton John's vocals are very strong these days.
At 59 years old, his voice has a dark and burnished quality. He can't, or
maybe he just doesn't choose to, reach for an upper register, except to give
out a bluesy yelp now and then. In other words, he sounds his age and the
album complements that maturity. On the most superficial level, it's a
nostalgia record, with Taupin's words reminding Elton of their early
wonderment over the first time these British lads experienced Hollywood,
Manhattan, fame, wealth and drugs. The album isn't a jaded downer, but it's
also much more than a litany of `We have survived' mawkishness. What both men
have always been good at is setting a mood and letting the mood speak for
itself without letting either piano chords or showy metaphors get in the way.

(Soundbite of "Wouldn't Have You Any Other Way")

Mr. JOHN: (Singing) "I remember it like it was yesterday. Snow in the park
and skaters on the ice, long black cars stand side-by-side, loading up the
boys at night. Turned up our collars to the chill of the wind, caught an
innocent smile from a taxi at the lights. Not something you'd see on New York
street. It's such an uncommon sight. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
The city's got a thing about it. Don't try to understand it. New York City,
I'd really like to stay. New York City, I wouldn't have you, I wouldn't have
you any other way."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: I'm afraid that many of my colleagues in the music press have
unthinkingly accepted the promotional idea that "The Captain and the Kid" is
the best album Elton and Bernie have made since, as so many reviews have
referred to it as 1975's classic "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt
Cowboy." But "Captain Fantastic" is no classic at all. I'd argue that it has
only one song on it that belongs on a `greatest hits': "Someone Saved My Life
Tonight." I'd further argue that the album Elton made before it, 1974's
"Caribou" was more wide-ranging and thoughtful, while the album he made after
it, 1975's "Rock of the Westies" is simply Elton John's most underrated album
every. Go listen to songs like "Island Girl" and "Hard Luck Story" and "Grow
Some Funk of Your Own," and tell me I'm wrong. And a new tune, like this one,
from "The Captain and the Kid," is more nuanced and truthful than anything on
"Captain Fantastic."

(Soundbite from "Old '67")

Mr. JOHN: (Singing) "Hey, how about this, a little conversation tonight,
thinking aloud how we struggled to find our place in the dizzy heights. Don't
often do this. We never really get the chance. Nearly froze to death on
Oxford Street. Now we're living in the south of France. Talking through the
evening, it's good to shoot the breeze. Just you and me on a balcony and
cicadas singing in the trees. Old '67, what a time it was, what a time of
innocence, what a time we've lost. Raise a glass and have a laugh, have a
laugh or two. Here's to old '67 and an older me and you."

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: That's the good thing about Elton John. He can sing about
missing the glorious freedom of 1967 and send out thanks on this album's liner
notes to contemporary acts like The Scissor Sisters and The Killers. He's
always been one of the most open-minded of rock stars. He's never lost a
sense of being a pop fan, of enjoying, being surprised by new sounds. It's
what gives what could have been a misty nostalgia trip the sound of a brisk
jaunt, an animated conversation between Elton and Bernie Taupin about what
gives them pleasure in the here and now.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is editor at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"The Captain and the Kid."

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite from "I Must Have Lost It on the Wind")

Mr. JOHN: (Singing) "I'm no longer counting. I'm not keeping score. I
could say my list of lovers doesn't matter anymore. But some are always in my
heart and some I'm not so sure. Either way..."

(End of soundbite)
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.