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Post by RPankn on Dec 30, 2004 5:55:54 GMT -5
CIA intrigue shadows jetA plane human rights watchers have been following worldwide as it allegedly airlifted terrorism suspects has ties in Oregon Wednesday, December 29, 2004 MIKE ROGOWAY Just who is Leonard Thomas Bayard? Bloggers around the world are chattering about Bayard and his Oregon company, Bayard Foreign Marketing LLC, new owner of a corporate turbo-jet the CIA supposedly used to ferry terrorism suspects to overseas torture chambers. The Washington Post and The Boston Globe wrote prominent stories about him this month. And yet nobody can find him anywhere. Somehow, Bayard avoided the kinds of public record lists that include people who hold driver's licenses, own land, are registered to vote, have been married, divorced, killed or convicted. He or his company apparently pulled together the money to buy a multimillion-dollar Gulfstream V jet last month, yet they appear nowhere in federal corporate or regulatory filings. His lawyer, Portland corporate attorney Scott Caplan, insists Leonard Bayard is a real person. If so, he's doing an awfully good job of hiding it. The mysterious Mr. Bayard caught the world's attention Dec. 1, when Federal Aviation Administration records first listed his obscure company as owner of a particular airplane that has become notorious among human rights advocates. Swedish authorities claim U.S. agents used that plane -- before Bayard owned it -- to whisk accused terrorism suspects out of the country to Egypt, where the prisoners claim they were tortured. The jet, Gulfstream serial number 581, has been linked to several other clandestine prisoner transfers. Its FAA registration number has changed at least twice this year. Before Bayard acquired the jet, it belonged to a Massachusetts company, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc. This month The Washington Post traced Premier to several shadowy individuals with recently issued Social Security numbers. Leonard Bayard seems to have no Social Security number at all. But he can, apparently, sign his own name. Bayard's signature appears, tantalizingly, in neat script at the bottom of an August corporate filing with the Oregon Secretary of State's office. The handwritten document identifies only one owner of Bayard Foreign Marketing, "Leonard Thomas Bayard." It lists the company's business address as Caplan's downtown Portland law office, and Caplan as the company's registered agent. A call placed to the phone number listed on Bayard's business registration reached an answering service operator, who would not say where she was located but said she had never met Leonard Bayard. For his part, Caplan won't say whether he's met Bayard: "I really can't say anything about the client," he said, though, when pressed, Caplan said he is positive Bayard does exist. Tom Malinowski doubts you'll ever meet him, though. Malinowski, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch in Washington, D.C., thinks the CIA invented Bayard. "It's a common practice to maintain front companies, and so that's the suspicion here," Malinowski said. "One has to surmise that the agency is using them to cover its tracks." If so, the CIA hasn't done an especially good job of it. Human rights organizations, hobbyist plane spotters and news reporters around the world have frequently recorded the Gulfstream's movements since October 2001, when it was allegedly used to ferry a terrorism suspect out of Pakistan. Since then, the plane has been cited several times for alleged involvement in what the CIA calls "extraordinary renditions," the practice of sending suspected terrorists to other countries for interrogation. In December 2001, for example, the two Egyptian suspects were allegedly deported from Sweden to Egypt on the Gulfstream V only hours after the government there quietly denied their applications for asylum and before lawyers could file appeals. The Swedish government, which had second thoughts after the case received press attention, says the deportation was coordinated by the U.S. government and that assurances the prisoners' rights would be protected were violated, according to a July report in The Washington Post. The Post reported that the Egyptian suspects' attorneys and family members allege the pair were tortured when they arrived in Egypt. The Post and The Boston Globe have reported several similar allegations involving prisoners transported on Bayard's Gulfstream jet, all before the Oregon company took ownership this month. At this point, Malinowski said, the CIA has apparently given up on keeping the airplane secret. "Their cover has been blown," he said, and if the agency unloaded its plane and bought another, watchdogs would catch on right away and start tracking the replacement jet. "Why waste money selling one perfectly good plane and buying another perfectly good plane?" Malinowski asked. "They can't undo what's been done." Mike Rogoway: 503-294-7699, mikerogoway@news.oregonian.com. Researchers Margie Gultry and Lynne Palombo contributed to this report. www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/business/1104325591194700.xml
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Post by Moses on Dec 30, 2004 7:44:12 GMT -5
Caplan says this because what he did was illegal. It is illegal to file corporate papers with non-existant people.
The CIA has since changed the tail number.
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Post by Moses on Dec 30, 2004 11:15:32 GMT -5
James Woolsey was CIA Director from 1993-5.
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Post by Moses on Dec 30, 2004 11:25:04 GMT -5
Parse this:
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Post by Moses on Jan 9, 2005 11:45:01 GMT -5
January 9, 2005
German's Claim of Kidnapping Brings Investigation of U.S. Link By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and SOUAD MEKHENNET
MUNICH - On the afternoon of Dec. 31, 2003, Khaled el-Masri was traveling on a tourist bus headed for the Macedonian capital, Skopje, where he was hoping to escape the "holiday pressures" of home life during a weeklong vacation. When the bus reached the Serbia-Macedonia border, Mr. Masri said, he was asked the usual questions: Where are you going? How long will you be staying? Mr. Masri, a German citizen, did not think much of it, until he realized that the border guards had confiscated his passport. The bus moved on, but an increasingly panicked Mr. Masri was ordered to stay behind. A few hours later, Mr. Masri, a 41-year-old unemployed car salesman, said he was taken to a small, windowless room and was accused of being a terrorist by three men who were dressed in civilian clothes but carrying pistols. "They asked a lot of questions - if I have relations with Al Qaeda, Al Haramain, the Islamic Brotherhood," recalled Mr. Masri, who was born in Lebanon. "I kept saying no, but they did not believe me." It was the first day of what Mr. Masri said would become five months in captivity. In an interview, he said that after being kidnapped by the Macedonian authorities at the border, he was turned over to officials he believed were from the United States. He said they flew him to a prison in Afghanistan, where he said he was shackled, beaten repeatedly, photographed nude, injected with drugs and questioned by interrogators about what they insisted were his ties to Al Qaeda. He was released without ever being charged with a crime. The German police and prosecutors have been investigating Mr. Masri's allegations since he reported the matter to them last June, two weeks after his return to Germany. Martin Hofmann, a senior national prosecutor in Munich who handles terrorism cases and is in charge of the Masri investigation, and another official, a senior organized crime investigator in southern Germany, say they believe Mr. Masri's story. They said investigators interviewed him for 17 hours over two days, that his story was very detailed and that he recounted it consistently. In addition, the officials said they had verified specific elements of the case, including that Mr. Masri was forced off the bus at the border. Still, much of Mr. Masri's story has not been corroborated. His assertion that he was held by Americans in Afghanistan, for example, is solely based on what he said he observed or was told after he was taken off the bus in Macedonia. Mr. Masri said he was confounded by his captors' insistence that he was a Qaeda operative. He attends a mosque in Ulm, Germany, that has been closely watched by the authorities because several suspected terrorists have worshiped there. But those authorities say Mr. Masri has never been a suspect. Mr. Masri's lawyer, Manfred R. Gnjidic, said he suspected that his client was swept into the C.I.A.'s policy of "renditions" - handing custody of a prisoner from United States control to another country for the purposes of interrogation - because he has the same name, with a slightly different spelling, as a man wanted in the Sept. 11 attacks. The policy has come under increasing criticism as other cases have come to light recently. Although the German authorities say they have no specific suspects in the Masri case, they say they are looking into the possible role of the United States and other countries. "It is an unusual case," Mr. Hofmann said. "The political dimension is huge. Under German law, we can charge a person with kidnapping, but not a country. Countries cannot kidnap people." Officials at Germany's national intelligence agency said they are also investigating. They said they asked the F.B.I. for assistance last fall but have received little help. A senior administration official said the Bush administration had been aware of these allegations for some time, but he referred questions to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. In a series of interviews, neither the C.I.A. nor the F.B.I. would deny or confirm Mr. Masri's allegations. A C.I.A. spokeswoman said the agency would not comment at all. Senior F.B.I. officials in Washington acknowledged that they received a request for help from the Germans last October, and said they were assisting in the investigation. The officials disputed that they had not worked aggressively on the case. "This is a very ongoing thing, and we are working together with the Germans to resolve it," a senior official said. "Our hope is we can get to the bottom of it." The official declined to discuss whether the bureau had had any contact with the C.I.A. or Pentagon about the allegations. Golan Pavlovski, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry of the Republic of Macedonia, said he had no information about Mr. Masri's case. When he returned home last June, Mr. Masri said, he felt relief but also rage. Asked whom he blames, Mr. Masri, a burly, soft-spoken man, looked at his hands for a long moment before saying, "Of course, I blame the Americans first." Similar Cases Mr. Masri's allegations bear similarities to the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian born in Syria who was suspected of being a Qaeda operative. Mr. Arar, who was detained in New York in 2002, says he was sent by the United States to Syria, where he says he was repeatedly tortured during 10 months in prison. A second detainee, Mamdouh Habib, an Australian, has asserted in court papers that he was tortured in an Egyptian prison for nearly six months in 2001 before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The allegations were contained in a motion filed with a federal court recently. Mr. Habib's lawyer has asked the federal district court in Washington to block the Bush administration from sending him back to Egypt, asserting that he would be tortured again there. The C.I.A. began the renditions program in the early 1990's, but its use has increased since the Sept. 11 attacks. Human rights organizations, who say the policy is tantamount to government-sponsored kidnapping, estimate that dozens of "high value" detainees are being held in secret locations around the world. C.I.A. officials have acknowledged that the agency conducts renditions, but say they do not condone the use of torture during interrogations. Mr. Masri, who had not gone public with his case, agreed to give an interview last month after being approached by The New York Times. During the interview, he spoke without notes, and in great detail, about his case. He said he was able to recount his time in captivity because he wrote down his experiences right after he was released. The timeline was corroborated by documents, including a bus ticket and a stamp on his passport in Albania on May 29, the date he said he was released. He returned to Germany on June 3. His account also matched details in a report about his case written by Amnesty International, whose officials interviewed Mr. Masri on June 21. "Mr. Masri had been questioned twice for a lot of hours, and he always has said the same things, he never changed details," Mr. Hofmann said in an interview about his country's investigation. "Therefore I don't think it would be possible that someone could invent such a story." Mr. Masri said his ordeal began after he decided to go on a short vacation without his family after arguing with his wife, choosing Skopje because it was inexpensive and friends had recommended it. After being interrogated the first night in Macedonia, Mr. Masri, who speaks German and Arabic, was taken to a motel on the outskirts of Skopje, where he said several men held him for 23 days. "They told me: 'You are not arrested. You aren't handcuffed, are you?' " Mr. Masri recalled. But he said he was not permitted to leave. (continued)
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Post by Moses on Jan 9, 2005 11:46:36 GMT -5
Questions About Al Qaeda
He said the men continued to question him about Al Qaeda. After several days, Mr. Masri said he lost his temper, demanded to speak with officials from the German government and tried to escape. "One man put his pistol in his hand and showed it to me, to stop me from leaving," Mr. Masri said.
Another week went by, he said, before another man arrived to question him. "He was nice to me," he recalled. "He said we'll make a deal - you say you are an Al Qaeda member, and sign a paper saying that, and we'll put you back on a plane and you will be deported to Germany."
Mr. Masri said he refused. The man left but returned two days later, he said, and this time he was more combative. "He said I'm not cooperative, I bring problems on myself, they know everything about me," Mr. Masri said. He said the man asserted that Mr. Masri was originally from Egypt and had been to a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan - allegations that Mr. Masri said he repeatedly denied.
After three and a half weeks, Mr. Masri said he was told that he could return to Germany. The Macedonians took a statement from him on videotape to show he was in good health when he left their country, he said. Afterward, Mr. Masri said, he was permitted to leave the motel, but a few steps down the road, a pickup truck pulled up next to him, and several men grabbed him.
Mr. Masri said that a hood was put over his head but that he believed he was driven to the airport because he could hear the roar of planes. He said he was taken to a room and beaten. He said his clothes were cut off with knives, and he heard the sounds of cameras taking pictures. "After I was naked they took off my mask so I could see, and all the people were in black clothes and black masks," he said. "There were seven or eight people."
Mr. Masri said a couple of men put him in a blue warm-up suit, handcuffed him and tied his hands to his belt, put plugs in his ears and blindfolded him. He said he was put on a plane, where he was forced to lie on the floor. Someone injected his arm, he said, and he fell into a deep sleep.
After an unknown number of hours, he said, he awoke to find that the plane had landed. He said he was taken to a building and imprisoned in a tiny, cold cell. "Everything was dirty - a dirty blanket, dirty water, like from a fish aquarium," he said.
On the walls in his cell were words written in Arabic and what he believed was Farsi. Mr. Masri said that his captors and fellow prisoners told him he was in Kabul, Afghanistan.
That first evening in prison, Mr. Masri said, a man he assumed was a doctor, wearing a thin black mask, came to his cell to take a vial of blood. He said he believed that the doctor was American because he spoke English. Mr. Masri said he was repeatedly punched in the head and neck by several guards who accompanied the doctor. He also said he was forced to run up and down stairs with his arms shackled behind his back.
The following morning, Mr. Masri said, an interrogator walked into his cell and, in a thick Lebanese accent, began shouting at him. "He told me, 'Where you are right now there is no law, no rights, no one knows you are here, and no one cares about you.' "
Mr. Masri said the man had a stack of documents and told him they knew "everything" about him, including that he was an associate of Mohamed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who is believed to have helped the hijackers. They also accused him of being a senior Qaeda operative who was trained in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, he said. "I denied everything - I kept saying, 'No, no, no.' "
His lawyer, Mr. Gnjidic, said he thought that his client had been confused with the Sept. 11 suspect Khalid al-Masri, because that man is believed by American authorities to have had contact with Mr. bin al-Shibh and Mr. Atta and to have been partly responsible for directing them to a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. It was there that the two men met Osama bin Laden, who enlisted them for the Sept. 11 mission.
More weeks went by, and Mr. Masri said he then met a man who presented himself as a top lieutenant at the prison. He believes that man was also an American, based on his accent.
"They asked me about Ulm, how many people go to the mosque, how often do they pray," he said. "I told them. When I asked why I was there, I never got an answer."
A Hunger Strike
In March, Mr. Masri said he began a hunger strike. On the 35th day, he said an Afghan prison guard told him, "The Americans don't care if you live or die."
Two days later, he said, he was beaten again and forcibly fed liquid through a tube shoved down his throat.
Mr. Masri said he then ended his hunger strike. He said he was getting to know his fellow prisoners - there were two Pakistani brothers and a man from Tanzania who had been there for several months. He also said there was a Pakistani man who had been there nearly two years.
"I'm sure those men will take revenge, after what was done to them," Mr. Masri said. "Some said to me - we hope to get out of here and then have the power to make something happen against the Americans."
Weeks went by. In May, Mr. Masri said he met a man he believed was German and who was introduced as "Sam." The man posed the same series of questions - mostly about any dealings he may have had with Mr. Atta and Mr. bin al-Shibh. "He was friendly," Mr. Masri said. "So I said, 'Can you please tell me if my family knows where I am?' And the German said, 'No, they don't know.' "
The German authorities said they were unable to confirm Mr. Masri's account of a German agent.
The Return Home
A week later, Mr. Masri said, he was blindfolded, taken to the airport and put on a flight, and then placed on a bus and driven for six or seven hours. His blindfold was removed, and a man told him to walk down a deserted, winding mountain road, he said. "I had the feeling after a few steps, they'd shoot me in the back."
He walked around the bend and came upon a border crossing, where three men in uniforms waited for him, he said. Mr. Masri said he told one of the men about his five months in captivity. "The man was laughing at me," he said. "He said: 'Don't tell that story to anyone because no one will believe it. Everyone will laugh.' "
Mr. Masri asked where they were; the man said in northern Albania, near the Macedonian border. The border officer handed Mr. Masri a plastic box containing the belongings that were taken from him on the first day of his captivity, including his passport and cash, he said. The man told him he was free to go, and his passport was stamped by the nation of Albania, on May 29, 2004.
From there, he bought an airplane ticket and flew to Frankfurt. Once in Germany, Mr. Masri said he returned to his hometown, Ulm, but his wife and four sons, ages 2 to 6, were not at home. "I feared the worst - I feared something happened to my family," he said. Four days later, he found them at his wife's mother's home in Lebanon.
In an interview, Mr. Masri's wife, Aischa, said she had moved back to Lebanon after not hearing from her husband. She said she began thinking, "Maybe he has gone to marry another woman."
Mrs. Masri, 29, said she did not expect to see him again. "The boys have cried a lot in Lebanon. They always have asked me, "Why are we here, Mom, and where is Daddy?' " she said, and then began to weep. "From time to time, I called his friends in Germany and asked them if they heard anything from him or about him. But no one knew anything."
Mr. Masri said he was still trying to rebuild his life. He said he had no steady employment, and almost no friends. "The phone doesn't ring - people have heard, and they don't want to see me," he said.
It was not until last August that Mr. Masri was told by his lawyer that he had the same name as the Sept. 11 suspect.
Mr. Masri said he was bedeviled by questions that he and the German authorities still could not answer. "There are so many questions," he said. "How did it happen? Why did it happen? I don't know."
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Post by Moses on Mar 30, 2005 12:28:56 GMT -5
Detainee's Suit Gains Support from Jet's Log By Scott Shane The New York Times
Wednesday 30 March 2005 Washington - Maher Arar, a 35-year-old Canadian engineer, is suing the United States, saying American officials grabbed him in 2002 as he changed planes in New York and transported him to Syria where, he says, he was held for 10 months in a dank, tiny cell and brutally beaten with a metal cable. Now federal aviation records examined by The New York Times appear to corroborate Mr. Arar's account of his flight, during which, he says, he sat chained on the leather seats of a luxury executive jet as his American guards watched movies and ignored his protests. The tale of Mr. Arar, the subject of a yearlong inquiry by the Canadian government, is perhaps the best documented of a number of cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which suspects have accused the United States of secretly delivering them to other countries for interrogation under torture. Deportation for interrogation abroad is known as rendition. In papers filed in a New York court replying to Mr. Arar's lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers say the case was not one of rendition but of deportation. They say Mr. Arar was deported to Syria based on secret information that he was a member of Al Qaeda, an accusation he denies. The discovery of the aircraft, in a database compiled from Federal Aviation Agency records, appears to corroborate part of the story Mr. Arar has told many times since his release in 2003. The records show that a Gulfstream III jet, tail number N829MG, followed a flight path matching the route he described. The flight, hopscotching from New Jersey to an airport near Washington to Maine to Rome and beyond, took place on Oct. 8, 2002, the day after Mr. Arar's deportation order was signed. After seeing a photograph of the plane and hearing its path, Mr. Arar, 35, of Ottawa, said in a telephone interview: "I think that's it. I think you've found the plane that took me." He added: "Finding this plane is going really to help me. It does remind me of this trip, which is painful, but it should make people understand that this is for real and everything happened the way I said. I hope people will now stop for a moment and think about the morality of this." Records of the jet's travels also show a trip in December 2003 to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States holds hundreds of detainees, suggesting that it was used by the government on at least one other occasion. If the plane was used to move Mr. Arar, it is the fourth known to have been used to transport suspected terrorists secretly from one country to detention in another. Among the three identified in previous news reports is one owned by a company apparently set up by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to The Washington Post. Another, first described by The Chicago Tribune, is an ordinary charter jet that was also used by the Boston Red Sox manager [/color]between missions ferrying detainees and their guards to Guantánamo, with the Red Sox logo attached to the fuselage or removed, depending on who was aboard.[/b] Maria LaHood, a lawyer for Mr. Arar, said the new information on the Gulfstream jet lent support to his lawsuit. "The facts we got from Maher right after he was released are now corroborated by public records," said Ms. LaHood, who works for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group in New York that advocates investigation of human rights abuses. "The more information that comes out, the better for showing that this is an important public issue that can't be kept secret." She said Mr. Arar and his attorneys believe that American officials wanted him to undergo a more brutal interrogation than would be permitted in the United States in the hope of getting information about Al Qaeda. After 10 months in a cell he compared to a grave, and 2 more months in a less confined space, Syrian officials freed Mr. Arar in October 2003, saying they had been unable to find any connection to Al Qaeda. The Syrian ambassador to the United States called the release "a gesture of good will toward Canada." Charles Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said the government had no comment on the case. The administration has refused to cooperate with the Canadian inquiry into Mr. Arar's case and has asked a judge to dismiss most of his lawsuit, saying that allowing it to proceed would reveal classified information. President Bush has said it is United States policy neither to engage in torture nor to deliver prisoners to countries where they are likely to be tortured. Former intelligence officials say rendition is useful for cases in which secret information has identified a suspected terrorist but cannot be used for a public prosecution in an American court. Mr. Arar has told a consistent story since his release: He was detained at Kennedy International Airport in New York on Sept. 26, 2002, while changing planes on the way back to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia. He was then held for nearly two weeks, awakened at 3 a.m. and taken to an airport in New Jersey, where he was put aboard a small jet. Shackled in place, Mr. Arar says, he followed the plane's movements on a map displayed on a video screen, watching as it traveled to Dulles Airport, outside Washington, to a Maine airport he believed was in Portland, to Rome, and finally to Amman, Jordan, where he was blindfolded and driven to Syria. According to F.A.A. flight logs for Oct. 8, 2002, only one aircraft flew from New Jersey to the Washington area to Maine to Rome: the 14-passenger Gulfstream III jet, operated by Presidential Aviation, a charter company in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The jet left Teterboro, N.J., for Dulles at 5:40 a.m.; proceeded at 7:46 a.m. to Bangor, Me.; and left Bangor for Rome at 9:36 a.m. The only conflict with Mr. Arar's story is that the Maine airport was Bangor, not Portland. And the logs cover only flights departing from the United States, so they document the trip only as far as Rome. Court records show, however, that immigration officials ordered him deported to Syria. Nigel England, director of operations for Presidential, said he would not divulge who rented the Gulfstream that day or discuss any clients. "It's a very select group of people that we fly, from entertainers to foreign heads of state, a whole gamut of customers that we fly and wouldn't discuss one over the other," he said. The plane flew about 50 flights a month to various destinations in 2002 and 2003, according to federal records. Presidential's Web site says a similar jet would now rent for about $120,000 for an itinerary like the one on which Mr. Arar apparently was flown. Records show that the plane was owned in 2002 by MJG Aviation, a Florida company that lists its manager as Mark J. Gordon, an entrepreneur who also owned Presidential at the time. Mr. Gordon could not be reached. The plane has since been sold and the tail number has been changed to N259SK, records show. As for Mr. Arar, he said he felt the identification of the plane helped establish his credibility. "I don't know for sure but probably people had some doubts about what I said," he said. "This goes to prove and corroborate at least part of my story. I hope even more information will come forward." <br>
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