Text 7044, 207 rader
Skriven 2005-01-05 19:55:31 av Björn Forsström (2:203/614.61)
     Kommentar till en text av ROSS SAUER (1:123/140)
Ärende: The CIA torture plane
=============================

This is a msg. imported from another echo so don't blame Ross for it.
If someone is to blame, blame me.

Enjoy.

 RS> Here's the article about the not-so-secret secret plane, run by the CIA.
 RS> Someone here is frantically trying to keep this "under the radar," and I
 RS> can see why.

 RS> Jet Is an Open Secret in Terror War

 RS> By Dana Priest
 RS> Washington Post Staff Writer
 RS> Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A01

 RS> The airplane is a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and
 RS> celebrities. But since 2001 it has been seen at military airports from
 RS> Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and
 RS> handcuffed passengers.

 RS> The plane's owner of record, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc.,
 RS> lists directors and officers who appear to exist only on paper. And each
 RS> one of those directors and officers has a recently issued Social Security
 RS> number and an address consisting only of a post office box, according to
 RS> an extensive search of state, federal and commercial records.

 RS> Bryan P. Dyess, Steven E. Kent, Timothy R. Sperling and Audrey M. Tailor
 RS> are names without residential, work, telephone or corporate histories --
 RS> just the kind of "sterile identities," said current and former
 RS> intelligence officials, that the CIA uses to conceal involvement in
 RS> clandestine operations. In this case, the agency is flying captured
 RS> terrorist suspects from one country to another for detention and
 RS> interrogation.

 RS> The CIA calls this activity "rendition." Premier Executive's Gulfstream
 RS> helps make it possible. According to civilian aircraft landing permits,
 RS> the jet has permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide.

 RS> Since Sept. 11, 2001, secret renditions have become a principal weapon in
 RS> the CIA's arsenal against suspected al Qaeda terrorists, according to
 RS> congressional testimony by CIA officials. But as the practice has grown,
 RS> the agency has had significantly more difficulty keeping it secret.

 RS> According to airport officials, public documents and hobbyist plane
 RS> spotters, the Gulfstream V, with tail number N379P, has been used to whisk
 RS> detainees into or out of Jakarta, Indonesia; Pakistan; Egypt; and Sweden,
 RS> usually at night, and has landed at well-known U.S. government refueling
 RS> stops.

 RS> As the outlines of the rendition system have been revealed, criticism of
 RS> the practice has grown. Human rights groups are working on legal
 RS> challenges to renditions, said Morton Sklar, executive director of the
 RS> World Organization for Human Rights USA, because one of their purposes is
 RS> to transfer captives to countries that use harsh interrogation methods
 RS> outlawed in the United States. That, he said, is prohibited by the U.N.
 RS> Convention on Torture.

 RS> The CIA has the authority to carry out renditions under a presidential
 RS> directive dating to the Clinton administration, which the Bush
 RS> administration has reviewed and renewed. The CIA declined to comment for
 RS> this article.

 RS> "Our policymakers would never confront the issue," said Michael Scheuer, a
 RS> former CIA counterterrorism officer who has been involved with renditions
 RS> and supports the practice. "We would say, 'Where do you want us to take
 RS> these people?' The mind-set of the bureaucracy was, 'Let someone else do
 RS> the dirty work.' "

 RS> The story of the Gulfstream V offers a rare glimpse into the CIA's secret
 RS> operations, a world that current and former CIA officers said should not
 RS> have been so easy to document.

 RS> Not only have the plane's movements been tracked around the world, but the
 RS> on-paper officers of Premier Executive Transport Services are also
 RS> connected to a larger roster of false identities.

 RS> Each of the officers of Premier Executive is linked in public records to
 RS> one of five post office box numbers in Arlington, Oakton, Chevy Chase and
 RS> the District. A total of 325 names are registered to the five post office
 RS> boxes.

 RS> An extensive database search of a sample of 44 of those names turned up
 RS> none of the information that usually emerges in such a search: no previous
 RS> addresses, no past or current telephone numbers, no business or corporate
 RS> records. In addition, although most names were attached to dates of birth
 RS> in the 1940s, '50s or '60s, all were given Social Security numbers between
 RS> 1998 and 2003.

 RS> The Washington Post showed its research to the CIA, including a chart
 RS> connecting Premier Executive's officers, the post office boxes, the 325
 RS> names, the recent Social Security numbers and an entity called Executive
 RS> Support OFC. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

 RS> According to former CIA operatives experienced in using "proprietary," or
 RS> front, companies, the CIA likely used, or intended to use, some of the 325
 RS> names to hide other activities, the nature of which could not be learned.
 RS> The former operatives also noted that the agency devotes more effort to
 RS> producing cover identities for its operatives in the field, which are
 RS> supposed to stand up under scrutiny, than to hiding its ownership of a
 RS> plane.

 RS> The CIA's plane secret began to unravel less than six weeks after the
 RS> Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

 RS> On Oct. 26, 2001, Masood Anwar, a Pakistani journalist with the News in
 RS> Islamabad, broke a story asserting that Pakistani intelligence officers
 RS> had handed over to U.S. authorities a Yemeni microbiologist, Jamil Qasim
 RS> Saeed Mohammed, who was wanted in connection with the October 2000 bombing
 RS> of the USS Cole.

 RS> The report noted that an aircraft bearing tail number N379P, and parked in
 RS> a remote area of a little-used terminal at the Karachi airport, had
 RS> whisked Mohammed away about 2:40 a.m. Oct. 23. The tail number was also
 RS> obtained by The Post's correspondent in Pakistan but not published.

 RS> The News article ricocheted among spy-hunters and Web bloggers as a
 RS> curiosity for those interested in divining the mechanics of the new U.S.-
 RS> declared war on terrorism.

 RS> At 7:54:04 p.m. Oct. 26, the News article was posted on FreeRepublic.com,
 RS> which bills itself as "a conservative news forum."

 RS> Thirteen minutes later, a chat-room participant posted the plane's
 RS> registered owners: Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., of 339
 RS> Washington St., Dedham, Mass.

 RS> "Sounds like a nice generic name," one blogger wrote in response. "Kind of
 RS> like Air America" -- a reference to the CIA's secret civilian airlines
 RS> that flew supplies, food and personnel into Southeast Asia, including
 RS> Laos, during the Vietnam War.

 RS> Eight weeks later, on Dec. 18, 2001, American-accented men wearing hoods
 RS> and working with special Swedish security police brought two Egyptian
 RS> nationals onto a Gulfstream V that was parked at night at Stockholm's
 RS> Bromma Airport, according to Swedish officials and airport personnel
 RS> interviewed by Swedish television's "Cold Facts" program. The account was
 RS> confirmed independently by The Post. The plane's tail number: N379P.

 RS> Wearing red overalls and bound with handcuffs and leg irons, the men, who
 RS> had applied for political asylum in Sweden, were flown to Cairo, according
 RS> to Swedish officials and documents. Ahmed Agiza was convicted by Egypt's
 RS> Supreme Military Court of terrorism-related charges; Muhammad Zery was set
 RS> free. Both say they were tortured while in Egyptian custody. Sweden has
 RS> opened an investigation into the decision to allow them to be rendered.

 RS> A month later, in January 2002, a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V landed at
 RS> Jakarta's military airport. According to Indonesian officials, the plane
 RS> carried away Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian traveling on a
 RS> Pakistani passport and suspected of being an al Qaeda operative who had
 RS> worked with shoe bomber suspect Richard C. Reid. Without a hearing, he was
 RS> flown to Egypt. His status and whereabouts are unknown. The plane's tail
 RS> number was not noted, but the CIA is believed to have only one of the
 RS> expensive jets.

 RS> Over the past year, the Gulfstream V's flights have been tracked by plane
 RS> spotters standing at the end of runways with high-powered binoculars and
 RS> cameras to record the flights of military and private aircraft.

 RS> These hobbyists list their findings on specialized Web pages. According to
 RS> them, since October 2001 the plane has landed in Islamabad; Karachi;
 RS> Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Baghdad; Kuwait City;
 RS> Baku, Azerbaijan; and Rabat, Morocco. It has stopped frequently at Dulles
 RS> International Airport, at Jordan's military airport in Amman and at
 RS> airports in Frankfurt, Germany; Glasglow, Scotland, and Larnaca, Cyprus.

 RS> Premier Executive Transport Services was incorporated in Delaware by the
 RS> Prentice-Hall Corporation System Inc. on Jan. 10, 1994. On Jan. 23, 1996,
 RS> Dean Plakias, a lawyer with Hill & Plakias in Dedham, filed incorporation
 RS> papers with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts listing the company's
 RS> president as Bryan P. Dyess.

 RS> According to public documents, Premier Executive ordered a new Gulfstream
 RS> V in 1998. It was delivered in November 1999 with tail number N581GA, and
 RS> reregistered for unknown reasons on March 2000 with a new tail number,
 RS> N379P. It began flights in June 2000, and changed the tail number again in
 RS> December 2003.

 RS> Plakias did not return several telephone messages seeking comment. He told
 RS> the Boston Globe recently that he simply filed the required paperwork.
 RS> "I'm not at liberty to discuss the affairs of the client business, mainly
 RS> for reasons I don't know," he told the Globe. Asked whether the company
 RS> exists, Plakias responded: "Millions of companies are set up in
 RS> Massachusetts that are just paper companies."

 RS> A lawyer in Washington, whose name is listed on a 1996 IRS form on record
 RS> at the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office in Massachusetts -- and
 RS> whose name is whited out on some copies of the forms -- hung up the phone
 RS> last week when asked about the company.

 RS> Three weeks ago, on Dec. 1, the plane, complete with a new tail number,
 RS> was transferred to a new owner, Bayard Foreign Marketing of Portland,
 RS> Ore., according to FAA records. Its registered agent in Portland, Scott
 RS> Caplan, did not return phone calls.

 RS> Like the officers at Premier Executive, Bayard's sole listed corporate
 RS> officer, Leonard T. Bayard, has no residential or telephone history.
 RS> Unlike Premier's officers, Bayard's name does not appear in any other
 RS> public records.

 RS> Researchers Margot Williams and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
 RS> Williams has since left The Washington Post.

 RS> © 2004 The Washington Post Company

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