Amnesty International has a new parody web site devoted to “Air Torture,” an insufficiently fictional airline that ferries detainees to places they can be tortured,
Air Torture is the premiere airline transporting detainees to select torture chambers around the world. Organizations such as Amnesty International like to call our business “outsourcing torture” because we deliver all our customers to countries where torture is routinely practiced – but our partners at the U.S. government have come up with a much better name: “extraordinary rendition.”
Thanks to the Bush Administration, the “war on terror” has been a big boon to our business. All flights are fully funded by unsuspecting taxpayers in the United States.
Incidentally, when I went to that site, it sent me to a page at https://www.kintera.org/ which appeared to have a unique ID in the URL. What’s up with that? Is Amnesty International tracking us too?
Thanks for the post!
The URL has some ID’s in it, but they are unique to the page, not to the person visiting the page. The Kintera CMS auto-generates these ID numbers. They are there because we’re using a database driven CMS tool. Long and short of it, there isn’t anything nefarious happening here. Certainly we do the standard sort of tracking that all sites do, pageviews, visitors, etc, but that tracking isn’t reflected in this URL. Oh, and the kintera.org part will switch over to airtorture.org by tomorrow morning.
We’re very excited about the site, thanks for the plug!
Steve Daigneault
Director, Internet Communications
Amnesty International, USA
What terrible things does it say about me that the first thing I thought of when I read “Air Torture” was a guy dancing around pretending to turn the crank of an invisible rack?
An earlier (better, IMO) example of this approach was the “Deportation Class” campaign, which publicized Lufthansa’s participation in deportations (from Germany) and detailed aspects of it — segregation of passengers, the use of sedatives, etc. Unfortunately, the site seems to be down, but a sampling of its wares can be found in the parent directory: https://koeln.ccc.de/archiv/deportationclass/.
I can’t figure out if this is some sort of circularity: a spoof on a spoof on a spoof. ??? Whatever, I believe that there is absolutely no limit or boundary to the evil and murderous machinations practiced by the Bushites. Anything is believable of them. And the saddest thing is they doubletalk and lie their way out of everything … and the American public has been so scared and cowed and manipulated that they appear to have lost most of the ability for questioning and scrutiny.