CIA Jet spotted in illegal imprisonment/torture

[Moses]

 Jet Is an Open Secret in Terror War
    By Dana Priest
    The Washington Post

    Monday 27 December 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Moses]

What is a Commercial Registered Office Provider?

Under Pennsylvania law (15 P.S. Sec. 109), entities required to provide a registered office address in any document filed in the Department of State may enter into a contract for the services of a Commercial Registered Office Provider(CROP), and may list the name of the CROP in lieu of providing a registered office address. This option is also available for any corporation or association that does not have a physical location or mailing address in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Listing a CROP without having entered into a contract to acquire the services of that CROP could subject a filer to civil and criminal penalties. Fictitious Name registrations may not use a CROP.

www.dos.state.pa.us/corps/cwp/view.asp?a=1093&q=431308

[Moses]

1994 or 8?

---

The Clinton administration pioneered the use of extraordinary rendition after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But it also pressed allied intelligence services to respect lawful boundaries in interrogations.

After years of fruitless talks in Egypt, President Bill Clinton cut off funding and cooperation with the directorate of Egypt's general intelligence service, whose torture of suspects has been a perennial theme in State Department human rights reports.

"You can be sure," one Bush administration official said, "that we are not spending a lot of time on that now."

Staff writers Bob Woodward, Susan Schmidt and Douglas Farah, and correspondent Peter Finn in Berlin, contributed to this report.

[Moses]

800 lb Gorilla

....Extraordinary rendition was codified in the Clinton administration. Under Bush it has been hugely expanded. As the US coordinator for counter-terrorism, Cofer Black, acknowledged in April 2003, "a large number of terrorist suspects were not able to launch an attack last year because they are in prison. More than 3,000 of them are al-Qaida terrorists and they were arrested in over 100 countries."

    Congressman Edward Markey, who last month introduced a bill to make extraordinary rendition illegal in US law, has noted that in the year after 9/11, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, admitted to the rendition of 70 people, describing them all as terrorists.

    Maher Arar, though, is not a terrorist. He is one of the few "ghost prisoners" who have emerged to testify to the reality behind extraordinary rendition. A Syrian-born Canadian, Arar was detained while changing planes in New York in 2002. His name was on a terrorist watch-list but he was not charged in the US or even extradited to Canada, a friendly country with an inconvenient regard for the rule of law. Instead he was flown to Jordan, then sent on to Syria, a state that the US categorises as one that practises torture.

    One CIA agent explained to a reporter how it worked in the 1990s. "We'd arrest them and send them to Jordan or Egypt, and they'd disappear," he said. They were not charged in the US, he said, because the evidence would not hold up in court.

    The evidence against Maher Arar did not even hold up in a Syrian court. His crime was that his mother's cousin had joined the Muslim Brotherhood long after Maher moved to Canada. After 10 months of torture and incarceration in a cell the size of a grave, he was allowed to resume his journey home. Now he is suing the US government.

    Some indication of the scale of the network of detention centres can be gleaned from a recent report by Human Rights First, formerly the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights. In Afghanistan, they say, in addition to the Bagram and Kandahar bases, the US acknowledges 20 other centres. In Iraq, there are three official centres, including Abu Ghraib, and an additional nine US military facilities. In Pakistan, a prison at Kohat, near the Afghan border, is under US control. In Jordan, the al-Jafr prison in the southern desert is used as a CIA detention centre. Human Rights First suspects that prisoners are held on US military ships and in bases such as Diego Garcia. Other prisoners have been "rendered" to Egypt and, as in the Arar case, to Syria, both countries in which torture is well established.

    Torture is illegal in the US. Facilitating torture elsewhere is also illegal under the convention against torture, to which the US is a signatory. "I think it's time," said Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch, "that we began to recognise that ghost prisoners are the new disappeared. And disappearance is almost invariably associated with mistreatment and torture."

    Congressman Markey has taken a stand. "Extraordinary rendition is the 800lb gorilla in our foreign and military policy-making that nobody wants to talk about. It involves our country out-sourcing interrogations to countries that are known to practise torture, something that erodes America's moral credibility," he said. It is up to his fellow Democrats to support him.

[Moses]

Renditions
www.news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/911comm-ss7.pdf

Under the presidential directives in the Clinton administration, PDD-39 and PDD-62, the CIA had two main operational responsibilities for combating terrorism—rendition and disruption.
PDD-62 remained in effect during the first months of the Bush administration and was still inforce on 9/11. These operations are managed out of an Intelligence Community center, the
Counterterrorist Center (CTC). Though it includes analysts, the CTC has always given primacy to operations. The director of the CTC effectively reports to the DCI through the CIA’s deputy
director for operations.

We will first discuss the CIA’s support with renditions. In other words, if a terrorist suspect isoutside of the United States, the CIA helps to catch and send him to the United States or a third
country.

In ordinary criminal cases, the foreign government makes an arrest. The Justice Department and the FBI seeks to extradite the suspect. The State Department facilitates the process.

The world of counterterrorism rarely follows these usual procedures. Overseas officials of CIA, the FBI, and the State Department may locate the person, perhaps using their own sources. If possible, they seek help from a foreign government. Though the FBI is often part of the process, the CIA is usually the major player, building and defining the relationships with the foreign government intelligence agencies and internal security services.

The CIA often plays an active role, sometimes calling upon the support of other agencies for logistical or transportation assistance. Director Tenet has publicly testified that 70 terrorists were rendered and brought to justice [sic] before 9/11.

These activities could only achieve so much. In countries where the CIA did not have cooperative relationships with local security services, the rendition strategy often failed. In at least two such cases when the CIA decided to seek the assistance of the host country, the target may have been tipped off and escaped. In the case of Bin Ladin, the United States had no diplomatic or intelligence officers living and working in Afghanistan. Nor was the Taliban regime inclined to cooperate. The CIA would have to look for other ways to bring Bin Ladin to justice.

[Moses]

The exact number of persons who receive the PDB varies by administration. In the Clinton administration, up to 25 people received the PDB. In the Bush administration, distribution in the pre-9/11 time period was limited to six people. The Commission received access to about four years of articles from the PDB related to Bin Ladin, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and key countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, including all the
Commission requested. The White House declined to permit all commissioners to review these sensitive documents.The Commission selected four representatives--the Chair, the Vice Chair, Commissioner Gorelick, and the Executive Director--as its review team.All four reviewed all of the more than 300 relevant articles. Commissioner Gorelick and the Executive Director prepared a detailed summary, reviewed by the White House for constitutional and especially sensitive classification concerns, that was then made available to all Commissioners and designated
staff. Except for the August 6, 2001, PDB article, the summary could not include verbatim quotations, for example the titles of the articles, but could paraphrase the substance.Two of the articles--the December 4, 1998, hijacking article (in chapter 4) and the August 6, 2001, article discussing Bin Ladin's plans to attack in the United States (in this chapter)--were eventually declassified.
9-11 Commission Footnotes

[Moses]

1996:

Beginning in 1996, the Clinton team made increasing use of what Berger described as "a new art form'' in the international commerce in terror suspects. Scores of times in the next five years, they persuaded allies to arrest members of al-Qaida and ship them somewhere else. Frequently, somewhere else was not the United States.Such a transfer without legal process was called "rendition.'' Most took place in secret and have yet to be disclosed. A State Department accounting of extraditions and renditions in the 1990s, published in April, named only 13. At least 40 more, according to sources, were removed forcibly from one foreign country to another on behalf of the United States.
www.timesunion.com/aspstories/storyprint.asp?storyID=45729

[RPankn]

'Ghost' jet used for terror suspects

From correspondents in Washington
December 29, 2004

A US jet registered to a ghost company whisks terror suspects to countries that use torture, according to the Washington Post.

The Gulfstream V turbojet had been seen at US military bases around the world, often loading hooded and shackled suspects and delivering them to countries known to use torture, a process the CIA calls "rendition", the newspaper said.

The jet, with the tail number N379P, had been seen in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

The executives of the plane's corporate owner, Premier Executive Transport Services, were all listed with dates of birth in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, but with social security numbers issued since 1998, the Post said. It was unable to locate any further business or credit information on them or the company.

The CIA refused to comment, but such "proprietary" or front corporations were standard procedure for the agency, former operatives told the newspaper.

The "rendering" of suspects to countries that employ interrogation techniques banned in the US is worrying and could violate the UN Convention on Torture, said Morton Sklar, US executive director of the World Organisation for Human Rights.


www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11799413%255E401,00.html

[RPankn]

[RPankn]

[RPankn]

Terror suspects' torture claims have Mass. link
Secrecy shrouds transfer jet

By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | November 29, 2004

DEDHAM -- Most here know Hill & Plakias as a family law firm that handles real estate and civil squabbles for the residents of this Boston suburb.

But the inconspicuous office above a Sovereign Bank, across from the red, white, and blue flags of a used car lot called Patriot Motors, is also the address of a shadowy company that owns a Gulfstream jet that secretly ferried two Al Qaeda suspects from Sweden to Egypt.

That prisoner transfer, which occurred outside the normal extradition procedures and without notifying the men's lawyers, sparked an international uproar after the two men contended that they had been forcibly drugged by masked US agents and tortured with electric shocks in Egypt.

This spring, the Swedish government launched a series of investigations into the 2001 operation.

Since that time, the jet -- apparently on long-term lease to the US military -- has surfaced in other alleged cases of what the CIA calls "extraordinary" rendition -- the secret practice of handing prisoners in US custody to foreign governments that don't hesitate to use torture in interrogations.

The covert procedure, which must be authorized by a presidential directive, has gained little attention inside the United States.

Yet, "extraordinary rendition," one of the earliest tools employed in the war against terror, has outraged human rights activists and former CIA agents, who say it violates the international convention on torture and amounts to "outsourcing" torture.

"People are more or less openly admitting that there are certain practices that we would rather not do in the US, so why not let our allies do it?" said Ray McGovern, a former CIA operations officer who has frequently criticized the tactics used in the war on terror.

In recent weeks, the practice has become nearly synonymous with the white, 20-seat, private Gulfstream jet, numbered N379P and registered in Massachusetts.

The Sunday Times of Britain reported two weeks ago that it had obtained a classified flight log of the plane that showed 300 flights from Washington, D.C., to 49 nations, including Libya, Jordan, and Uzbekistan -- three countries where the State Department has reported the use of torture. The story focused on the jet and Premier Executive Transport Services, the Massachusetts-registered company that owns it.

Sightings of the plane -- at refueling stops in Ireland and in Karachi, where it reportedly picked up another suspect -- have been published in newspapers across the globe and on the Internet. Records at the US Army Aeronautical Services Agency show the civil aircraft has a permit to land at US military bases worldwide.

But in Massachusetts, little is known about the jet, apparently even by the lawyer who serves as the public face of the company that owns it.

"I'm not at liberty to discuss the affairs of the client business, mainly for reasons I don't know," said Dean Plakias, whose Washington Street firm in Dedham is listed as the legal local representative of the company. When asked whether the company even exists, Plakias said, "Millions of companies are set up in Massachusetts that are just paper companies."

In a later interview, he said the owners of Premier "are simply a client that leases the plane . . . out to third-party operators." He would not comment on the relationship between Premier and those operators.

When asked why the company wanted to be authorized to do business in Massachusetts or whether the plane ever traveled to Logan International Airport, Plakias said he "can't respond."

The company first incorporated in Delaware in 1994 and then in Massachusetts two years later. Neither Plakias nor the Delaware resident agent, The Prentice-Hall Corporation System, would release any information about the company or its owners. Both Plakias and an employee at Prentice-Hall said their main role was to forward mail and update annual filings to the government. Plakias acknowledged that he had not filed the required annual report to the Massachusetts secretary of state's office since 2000.

The identities of the company's owners are obscure at best.

The most recent records at the Massachusetts secretary of state's office list Bryan P. Dyess as the president and member manager and Mary Anne Phister as treasurer. No Massachusetts address could be found for Phister. The only Bryan P. Dyess that a Globe reporter could locate receives his mail at a post office box in Arlington, Va., on North George Mason Drive, 7 miles from the Pentagon.

Records with the Federal Aviation Administration list the current vice president as Colleen A. Bornt, whose only address appears to be a post office box in Chevy Chase, Md. Records indicate that both Dyess, 48, and Bornt, 54, received their Social Security numbers in the mid-1990s.

People who receive Social Security numbers late in adulthood are either recent immigrants or people given a new identity, said Beatrice Gaines, a spokeswoman for the Social Security Administration. Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 commission in March that "renditions" were a major part of the plan to combat Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and that at least 70 had taken place prior to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In May, Newsweek reported that an undisclosed US agency set up a "covert charter airline" to move CIA prisoners because "it was judged impolitic [and too traceable] to use the US Air Force." Seymour Hersh's new book, "Chain of Command," suggests that a secret group inside the Department of Defense conducts the renditions. A CIA spokesman declined comment for this article.

In May, the Swedish television show "Kalla Fakta," or "Cold Facts," obtained a telephone number for Premier's owners from Plakias that began with the 703 area code of Arlington, Va. Fredrik Laurin, a journalist who helped produce the program, then posed as a potential client who wanted to rent the plane. The woman who answered the phone, identified as Mary Ellen McGuiness, said "the plane was on a long-term lease with the US government," said Laurin, who recorded the conversation for the show.

The first time the plane was mentioned in the press appears to be in October 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks. The Pakistani newspaper The News International reported that a jet "having the registration numbers N-379 P" landed at the Karachi airport at 1 a.m. one day that month to collect a foreign Al Qaeda suspect believed to be Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammad, a Yemeni university student.

Two months later, the same jet landed in Stockholm to take two Egyptians who had applied for asylum, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed Al-Zery, to Egypt, according to a recently unclassified report by Sweden's Justice Department, interviews with Zery's lawyer, and news reports.

Kjell Jönsson, a lawyer for Zery in Sweden, said in a telephone interview that masked US agents inserted an unknown drug into his client's rectum, diapered him, and shackled him before bringing him aboard the plane. Jönsson said they also placed a blindfold on him that remained for some time -- perhaps for weeks -- after his arrival in Egypt. In Egypt, Jönsson said, "They were interrogated under violence. The electrodes were put on sensitive parts of their bodies. It's no secret."

Jönsson said that he later learned his client had been suspected in 1993 of involvement in an extremist group in Egypt called Talaeh al-Fatah, associated with Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri. But after nearly two years in prison, Zery was released and cleared of all charges without ever going before a judge.

Jönsson said his client was abused despite "diplomatic assurances" that the Egyptians gave to the Swedish government that Zery would be treated humanely and given a fair trial. Agiza, the other suspect, was sentenced by a military court to 25 years imprisonment for being a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an outlawed militant group.

A month after the Swedish operation, in January 2002, a Gulfstream jet arrived in a Jakarta, Indonesia, airport to whisk away 24-year-old Muhammad Saad Iqbal, believed to be an acquaintance of Richard Reid, the British "shoe-bomber," according to the Washington Post, but it is unclear whether it bore the same registration number. The US government has also declined to release information on where Iqbal was taken and where he is now.

On Jan. 29, after the plane's registration number had appeared in the press, Bornt, the company vice president, wrote to the Federal Aviation Administration requesting that it be changed, according to an employee at the agency's aircraft registration office in Oklahoma City. The letter was written on Premier's letterhead, which bore the address of the Dedham law office.

The Massachusetts connection hit a nerve with US Representative Edward D. Markey, a Malden Democrat who has been fighting in Congress to outlaw extraordinary renditions. "I am appalled and saddened to learn that a company linked to Massachusetts appears to be aiding and abetting the transport of prisoners to foreign nations where they are likely to face torture in violation of the Geneva Convention," said Markey.

In Dedham, Plakias said he was not involved in the day-to-day activities of the company. When asked whether he knew of the plane's travels, he said: "I have read a couple of news reports. I really don't know whether they are accurate or not."

Farah Stockman can be reached at [e-mail].

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/11/29/terror_suspects_torture_claims_have_mass_link?pg=full

[RPankn]

Markey pledges battle on rendition practice
Requests details on local firm's role
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | November 30, 2004

MEDFORD -- As pressure mounts for Congress to pass legislation overhauling US intelligence agencies before the end of the year, Representative Edward J. Markey pledged yesterday to fight "extraordinary rendition" -- the covert practice of transferring suspects in US custody to countries where they are likely to face torture during interrogation.

"There is no question that there are still many inside the Bush administration and inside the Congress that want to legalize extraordinary renditions," Markey said at a news conference in Medford yesterday. "This is part of a battle that is still being fought."

The Globe reported yesterday that a Massachusetts-based company, Premier Executive Transport Services of Dedham, is linked to the secret transfer of two Egyptians who were allegedly tortured with electric shocks in Egypt during interrogation.

Markey wrote a letter yesterday asking President Bush to disclose more information about Premier and the government's secret transfer of prisoners abroad.

The tug-of-war in Congress over whether the president and the secretary of homeland security should have the power to send suspects to countries where torture is used in interrogation is one of many issues that have complicated the fate of 9/11 commission legislation.

If lawmakers do not pass an overhaul this year, they will have to start from scratch next year.

The original version of the 9/11 commission legislation held provisions that loosened protections against the torture of terror suspects and allowed the secretary of homeland security to authorize the transfer of a suspect in US custody to a country that uses torture in interrogations, as long as the US receives diplomatic assurances that the suspect will not be harmed.

A compromise bill removed much of that language, along with other wording that would make it easier to deport illegal immigrants, partly mollifying critics like Markey.

But the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, has held up the bill, insisting on tougher provisions against illegal immigration.

Representative Duncan Hunter of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has also opposed the compromise bill over concerns that the intelligence realignment could interfere with the military chain of command.

Both Democrats and Republicans are urging Bush to press holdout Republican lawmakers to get compromise legislation passed.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that Bush is going to send a letter to congressional leaders later this week urging lawmakers to pass the legislation as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported today that the International Committee of the Red Cross has alleged, in confidential reports submitted to the United States government, that the American military has deliberately used psychological and physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

The Times said the finding was made after an inspection by Red Cross personnel in June. The US government, which received the report in July, vehemently denied the allegations, the paper said. Among them: that doctors and medical personnel assisted in the planning of the interrogations, which the Red Cross report said was a "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/11/30/markey_pledges_battle_on_rendition_practice_requests_details_on_local_firms_role/

[RPankn]

N313P -- an anonymous-looking Boeing 737 hired by American agents from Premier Executive Transport Services.


Details of US 'torture by proxy flights' emerge


Stephen Grey
The Times (UK)
November 14, 2004

AN executive jet is being used by the American intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to countries that routinely use torture in their prisons.

The movements of the Gulfstream 5 leased by agents from the United States defence department and the CIA are detailed in confidential logs obtained by The Sunday Times which cover more than 300 flights.

Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is using such regimes to carry out "torture by proxy" — a charge denied by the American government.

Some of the information from the suspects is said to have been used by MI5 and MI6, the British intelligence services. The admissibility in court of evidence gained under torture is being considered in the House of Lords in an appeal by foreign-born prisoners at Belmarsh jail, south London, against their detention without trial on suspicion of terrorism.

Over the past two years the unmarked Gulfstream has visited British airports on many occasions, although it is not believed to have been carrying suspects at the time.

The Gulfstream and a similarly anonymous-looking Boeing 737 are hired by American agents from Premier Executive Transport Services, a private company in Massachusetts.

The white 737, registration number N313P, has 32 seats.

It is a frequent visitor to American military bases, although its exact role has not been revealed.

More is known about the Gulfstream, which has the registration number N379P (which has since been changed to N8068V (link)) and can carry 14 passengers. Movements detailed in the logs can be matched with several sightings of the Gulfstream at airports when terrorist suspects have been bundled away by US counterterrorist agents.

Analysis of the plane's flight plans, covering more than two years, shows that it always departs from Washington DC. It has flown to 49 destinations outside America, including the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and other US military bases, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan.

Witnesses have claimed that the suspects are frequently bound, gagged and sedated before being put on board the planes, which do not have special facilities for prisoners but are kitted out with tables for meetings and screens for presentations and in-flight films.

The US plane is not used just for carrying prisoners but also appears to be at the disposal of defence and intelligence officials on assignments from Washington.

Its prisoner transfer missions were first reported in May by the Swedish television programme Cold Facts. It described how American agents had arrived in Stockholm in the Gulfstream in December 2001 to take two suspected terrorists from Sweden to Egypt.

At the time of what was presented as an "extradition" to Egypt, Swedish ministers made no public mention of American involvement in the detention of Ahmed Agiza, 42, and Muhammed Zery, 35, who was later cleared.

Witnesses described seeing the prisoners handed to US agents whose faces were masked by hoods. The clothes of the handcuffed prisoners were cut off and they were dressed in nappies covered by orange overalls before being forcibly given sedatives by suppository.

The Gulfstream flew them to Egypt, where both prisoners claimed they were beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. Despite liberal Swedish laws on freedom of information, diplomatic telegrams on the case released to the media were edited to conceal the complaints of torture.

Hamida Shalaby, Agiza's mother, said: "The mattress had electricity . . . When they connected to the electricity, his body would rise up and then fall down and this up and down would go on until they unplugged electricity."

A month before the Swedish extradition, the same Gulfstream was identified by Masood Anwar, a Pakistani newspaper reporter in Karachi. Airport staff told Anwar they had seen Jamil Gasim, a Yemeni student who was suspected of links to Al-Qaeda, being bundled aboard the jet by a group of white men wearing masks. The jet took Gasim to Jordan, since when he has disappeared.

"The entire operation was so mysterious that all persons involved in the operation, including US troops, were wearing masks," a source at the airport told Anwar.

On another mission, in January 2002, a Gulfstream was seen at Jakarta airport to deport Muhammad Saad Iqbal, 24, an Al-Qaeda suspect who was said by US officials to be an acquaintance of Richard Reid, the British " shoe-bomber" jailed in America for trying to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami.

An Indonesian official told an American newspaper that Iqbal was "hustled aboard an unmarked, US-registered Gulfstream . . . and flown to Egypt", where almost nothing has been heard of him since.

The CIA Gulfstream's flight logs show it flew from Washington to Cairo, where it picked up Egyptian security agents, before apparently going on to Jakarta to take Iqbal to Egypt.

Another transfer involved a British citizen. On November 8, 2002, the Gulfstream took off for Banjul in Gambia. On the same day Wahab Al-Rawi, a 38-year-old Briton, was among four people arrested at the airport by local secret police and handed over to interrogators who said they were "from the US embassy".

Wahab said he had previously been questioned by MI5 because his brother Basher, an Iraqi national, was an acquaintance of Abu Qatada, the radical London-based cleric.

When Wahab asked the CIA agents for access to the British consul, as required under the Vienna convention signed by America, the agents are said to have laughed. "Why do you think you're here?" one agent said to Wahab. " It's your government that tipped us off in the first place." Wahab was later released but Basher was sent to Guantanamo and remains there and has yet to be accused of any specific crime.

Some former CIA operatives and human rights campaigners claim the agency and the Pentagon use a process called "rendition" to send suspects to countries such as Egypt and Jordan. They are then tortured largely to gain information for the Americans who, it is alleged, encourage these countries to use aggressive interrogation methods banned under US law.

Bob Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East, said: "If you want a serious interrogation you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear . . . you send them to Egypt."

Among the countries where prisoners have been sent by America is Uzbekistan, a close ally and a dictatorship whose secret police are notorious for their interrogation methods, including the alleged boiling of prisoners. The Gulfstream made at least seven trips to the Uzbek capital.

The details bolster claims by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador, that America has sent terrorist suspects from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan to be interrogated by torture.

In a memo, whose disclosure last month contributed to Murray's removal, he told Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, that the CIA station chief in Tashkent had "readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence".

The CIA and Premier declined to discuss the allegations over the planes. The American government, however, denies it is in any way complicit in torture and says it is actively working to stamp out the practice.


www.notinourname.net/restrictions/torture-flights-14nov04.htm

[RPankn]

Jet linked to torture claims is sold

Mass. firm had role in flying terror suspects to Egypt

By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | December 9, 2004

A secretive Massachusetts- registered company involved in ferrying Al Qaeda suspects to Egypt, where they were allegedly tortured, has sold its private jet amid media reports about the plane's activities.

Premier Executive Transport Services, whose legal address is the Dedham law firm Hill & Plakias, sold the plane to a company in Oregon two weeks ago, shortly after the Globe asked the law firm about the plane's involvement in the covert transfer of two suspects to an Egyptian prison, according to documents filed with the Federal Aviation Administration.

News of the sale surprised human rights activists who are planning to stage a vigil at noon tomorrow outside the law firm to mark International Human Rights Day.

John Schuchardt, a member of the North Shore Coalition for Peace and Justice, said the group decided to gather in Dedham because ''if torture has a Massachusetts connection, Massachusetts citizens must go."

The fact that the plane has been sold out of state would not deter the protest, he said.

''This is just part of a larger struggle seeking to return this country to respect for law and respect for universal human rights," said Schuchardt, a Marine Corps veteran who resigned his post in 1965 because of opposition to US actions in Vietnam.

The Gulfstream jet, identified by registration number N379P, drew international attention after the Swedish government launched an investigation into the US-ordered covert transfer in 2001 of two Egyptian men, who later reported they were drugged by US agents and tortured with electric shocks during interrogation in Egypt.

One of the men, Muhammed Al-Zery, was later cleared of all charges, according to his Swedish lawyer. According to Human Rights Watch, the second man, Ahmed Agiza, was convicted of terrorism-related crimes and sentenced to 25 years in prison after what it called an unfair trial in a military court.

The plane, which is authorized to land at US military bases worldwide, also carried at least one other terror suspect from an airport in Pakistan in a covert practice known as extraordinary rendition.

The jet's new owner, a limited liability company called Bayard Foreign Marketing, is as reluctant as Premier was to provide basic information about the company or the intended use of the plane.

Scott Caplan, a lawyer whose Portland law office serves as Bayard's legal address, declined to answer questions about why Bayard bought the plane, who owns Bayard, or the year-old company's line of business.

''This is a client that does not want to be talked about," Caplan said.

When asked whether he knew about the plane's previous missions abroad, Caplan said he ''can't say," citing client confidentiality.

Premier's request to transfer the plane's registration to the Oregon company was filed Nov. 29, the same day the Globe published details of the plane's flights transferring prisoners to countries that use brutal interrogation techniques. The bill of sale also filed with the FAA indicates that the plane was sold Nov. 16.

Premier also sold its other plane, a Boeing 747, to Keeler and Tate Management, of Reno, Nev. Tyler Edward Tate, listed as an officer of that company, could not be reached for comment.

A Swedish television news program reported that the Gulfstream jet is on a long-term lease with an undisclosed branch of the US government.

In the 1960s and '70s, the CIA controlled a far-flung network of airlines that included about 200 planes and nearly 20,000 employees, making it roughly the size of TWA and one of the world's largest airlines at the time, Time magazine reported.

But in 1975, after the Iran- contra scandal, Congress pressured the CIA to sell its proprietary airlines, which included Intermountain Airlines and Air America, which flew in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

The CIA is now free to lease planes. Premier bought the Gulfstream in 1999 from the manufacturer. The plane has since logged about 300 trips, including to Libya, Uzbekistan, and Jordan, according to The Sunday Times of London.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/12/09/jet_linked_to_torture_claims_is_sold/

[RPankn]

Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking?

"It was white with no markings but it was definitely military, it just had that look. It had two rear engines, a big fin on the back like a spoiler on the back of a car and with two upright fins at the side. It definitely wasn't one of those executive jets," said Susan Mcelwain.

"Decker and Chaney described the plane as a Lear-jet type, with engines mounted near the tail and painted white with no identifying markings."

"The FBI's later explanation for the white jet was that a passing civilian Fairchild Falcon 20 jet...Susan Mcelwain says a Falcon 20 was not the plane she saw."

"The unmarked military-style jet swooped down at high speed through the valley, twice circled the smoldering black scar where Flight 93 had careered into the ground just seconds earlier and then hurtled off over the horizon.

At least six eyewitnesses saw the mysterious aircraft on the morning of September 11 last year. But the US authorities deny it ever existed.

What was the white jet doing there and why won't they admit to its presence? Why did other witnesses see smoke and flames trailing from Flight 93 as it fell from the sky, indicating a possible explosion aboard?
Or - and this is proving to be the most uncomfortable question of all - in the moments before the airliner piled into the black, spongy earth at 575mph did an American fighter pilot have to do the unthinkable and shoot down a US civil airliner?

Susan Mcelwain, 51, who lives two miles from the site, knows what she saw - the white plane rocketed directly over her head.

"It came right over me, I reckon just 40 or 50ft above my mini-van," she recalled. "It was so low I ducked instinctively. It was traveling real fast, but hardly made any sound.

"Then it disappeared behind some trees. A few seconds later I heard this great explosion and saw this fireball rise up over the trees, so I figured the jet had crashed. The ground really shook. So I dialled 911 and told them what happened.

"I'd heard nothing about the other attacks and it was only when I got home and saw the TV that I realized it wasn't the white jet, but Flight 93.

I didn't think much more about it until the authorities started to say there had been no other plane. The plane I saw was heading right to the point where Flight 93 crashed and must have been there at the very moment it came down.

"There's no way I imagined this plane - it was so low it was virtually on top of me. It was white with no markings but it was definitely military, it just had that look.

"It had two rear engines, a big fin on the back like a spoiler on the back of a car and with two upright fins at the side. I haven't found one like it on the internet. It definitely wasn't one of those executive jets. The FBI came and talked to me and said there was no plane around.

"Then they changed their story and tried to say it was a plane taking pictures of the crash 3,000ft up.
"But I saw it and it was there before the crash and it was 40ft above my head. They did not want my story - nobody here did."

Mrs Mcelwain, who looks after special needs children, is further convinced the whole truth has yet to come out because of a phone call she had within hours from the wife of an air force friend of the family.

"She said her husband had called her that morning and said 'I can't talk, but we've just shot a plane down,' " Susan said. "I presumed they meant Flight 93. I have no doubt those brave people on board tried to do something, but I don't believe what happened on the plane brought it down.

Lee Purbaugh, 32, was the only person to see the last seconds of Flight 93 as it came down on former strip-mining land at precisely 10.06am - and he also saw the white jet.

"Yes, there was another plane," Lee said. "I didn't get a good look but it was white and it circled the area about twice and then it flew off over the horizon."
Tom Spinelli, 28, was working at India Lake Marina, a mile and a half away. "I saw the white plane," he said.
"It was flying around all over the place like it was looking for something. I saw it before and after the crash."

The FBI's later explanation for the white jet was that a passing civilian Fairchild Falcon 20 jet was asked to descend from 34,000ft to 5,000ft some minutes after the crash to give co-ordinates for the site. The plane and pilot have never been produced or identified. Susan Mcelwain says a Falcon 20 was not the plane she saw." -Daily Mirror (9/13/02)

"In separate interviews Thursday, five residents who live and work less than four miles from the crash site said they saw a second plane flying erratically within minutes of the crash of the Boeing 757 that took off from Newark two hours earlier Tuesday morning.

Susan Mcelwain of Stonycreek Township said a small white jet with rear engines and no discernible markings swooped low over her minivan near an intersection and disappeared over a hilltop, nearly clipping the tops of trees lining the ridge.

It was less than a minute later, Mcelwain said, that the ground shook and a white plume of smoke appeared over the ridge. "It was so close to me I ducked," Mcelwain said. "I heard it hit and saw the smoke. All I could think of was how close I came to dying. "

"As soon as we looked up, we saw a midsized jet flying low and fast," Decker said. "It appeared to make a loop or part of a circle, and then it turned fast and headed out. " Decker and Chaney described the plane as a Lear-jet type, with engines mounted near the tail and painted white with no identifying markings.

Earlier Thursday, FBI Special Agent William Crowley said investigators could not rule out that a second plane was nearby during the crash. He later said he had misspoken. He dismissed rumors that a U.S. military jet had intercepted the plane before it could strike a target in Washington, D.C. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, President Bush's nominee for chairman of the joint chiefs of staff rejected rumors that the military had shot down the hijacked plane.
"The armed forces did not shoot down any aircraft," Air Force Gen. Richard Myers said.

An official at the Cleveland Air Traffic Control Center in Oberlin, Ohio, which tracked Flight 93 as it turned in the sky and tracked eastward from the Cleveland area, said "no comment" when asked if there was any record of a second plane over the crash site.

"That's something that the FBI is working on and I cannot talk about," said Richard Kettel, head of tower operations at the Cleveland center. He spoke shortly before the FBI announced it had no evidence of a second jet.

Susan Custer said she saw a small white jet streaking overhead.

"Then I heard the boom and saw the mushroom cloud. " Robin Doppstadt was working inside her family food-and-supply store when she heard the crash. When she went outside, she said, she saw a small white jet that looked like it was making a single circle over the crash site.

"Then it climbed very quickly and took off. " "It's the d**ndest darn thing," said Dale Browning, a farmer.
"Everybody's seen this thing in the sky, but no one can tell us what it is." -The Bergen Record (9/14/01)


thewebfairy.com/killtown/flight93.html