TortureReport finds Aero aids torture by transporting suspects

A recently released report by the University of North Carolina’s law school has reinvigorated protests against Aero Contractors Ltd. for its alleged role in transporting terrorism suspects to secret foreign prisons where they are interrogated and possibly tortured.

Critics of the company say the North Carolina company has ties to the CIA and helps facilitate extraordinary rendition by transporting suspects from one country to another.

The protest group NC Stop Torture Now argues that because the United States has signed various international human rights treaties prohibiting torture, each state is obligated to uphold them. For the past several years, NC Stop Torture Now has lobbied the state Attorney General as well as the governor to take action against the company.

The report as well as the protest group acknowledges that Aero employees do not directly engage in torture, but their actions do aid and abet human rights violations.

NC Stop Torture along with Deborah M. Weissman, a law professor at the University of North Carolina and the author of the report, presented her study to state officials, and according to Christina Cowger, one of the leaders of N.C. Stop Torture Now, officials took the report seriously and asked many questions.

Cowger said she feels buoyed by the report and believes that it has added credibility to their cause.

“We’d like to start by just having them agree that torture is wrong,” she said. “We’ve been working on this for more than six years, and they’ve never even said that.”

Beginning in 2006 NC Stop Torture Now has lobbied state officials to take action against Aero, but Roy Cooper, the state’s Attorney General, has repeatedly declined to investigate the company’s activities. In 2007 and 2008, the state’s General Assembly failed to formally ban torture in North Carolina.