Few eyebrows were raised on Sunday when an otherwise-obscure Boeing 757 slipped into McCarran airport. The airliner is known to sometimes carry a crew of 11 and can accommodate 178 passengers, but it's unlikely the plane was ferrying gamblers or CES conventioneers to our fair city.
The plane is well-known, though, to a cadre of die-hard aviation watchers who recognized the registration number -- N226G. That number speaks volumes to those who understand what it represents.
N226G is widely suspected of being one of the infamous "rendition planes." As readers know, American intelligence agencies have been waging their own secret war on terror. They use an innocuous term "rendition" to describe the tactics they employ, but there's another word that would work just as well -- torture.
Extraordinary rendition is an abomination. It represents everything that we as Americans are supposed to oppose. Under this program, terrorists or suspected terrorists have been kidnapped, whisked away aboard private aircraft, plopped into dark, dank prisons located in countries with despicable human rights records and are reportedly then subjected to horrific torture techniques. Many suspected terrorists have died or disappeared. A "lucky" few have been let go, sometimes after months of physical abuse, because their captors had to reluctantly admit they had grabbed the wrong guys.
After 9/11, the Bush administration pursued these renditions with a vengeance. Whatever legal rights the suspects had were thrown out the window. International law was ignored. There were no warrants, no formal charges, no judicial oversight, no trials.
Can we say for certain that N226G is a torture plane? No. We do have a lot of clues, though. The plane is owned by a company called Comco, which is owned by another company called L-3 Capital, which has reportedly done a lot of work for prominent defense contractor Raytheon (a longtime fixture at the Nevada Test Site and Area 51). Maybe it is a coincidence, but L-3 and Raytheon both share the same modest address, a building in Helena, Mont., that houses several law offices. That, too, is a clue. In general, the CIA doesn't transport terrorists from place to place in planes that carry a CIA logo on the outside. The agency relies instead on shell companies run by fictional people, firms that are established by real-life lawyers who fudge the documents and try to make it as hard as possible for anyone to figure out who the real owners are. Nevada's loose incorporation laws have made it pretty easy for the CIA to set up bogus front companies right here in the Silver State, a fact that has been outlined in previous CityLife columns.
Anti-torture activists all over the world do their best to track every flight of every suspected torture plane, including N226G. One of its sister planes, also owned by Comco, caused an international stir back in 2003 when it was forced to land in India after it left Karachi, Pakistan, on its way to the Maldives, both of which are places you don't want to go if you're a rendition victim.
It seems doubtful that N226G arrived in Las Vegas this week carrying any torture victims. The rendition planes serve many functions, such as shuttling Homeland Security types or other spooks to different military bases for training or other operations. (One of the planes was carrying tons of cocaine when it crashed in Mexico not too long ago.) Other torture planes have been making regular stops in Nevada for the last few years, not only at McCarran but also at North Las Vegas and Nellis. Maybe the crews are trying to tie up loose ends before things hit the fan on Inauguration Day, a day when -- we hope -- America's well-documented reliance on illegal kidnappings and abominable torture techniques will end ... forever.
To make sure that Nevada does not remain a haven for the shell companies that perpetuate torture, let's hope state officials tighten up our incorporation laws so that phony companies created to shield illegal and heinous activities can be weeded out of the files and tossed into the trash where they belong. The next time N226G comes to town, maybe it will be carrying a planeload of porn stars instead of spooks.
