'Ghost' jet used for terror suspects

[seemslikeadream]

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

[sniffa]

1. it must be that steaLth bomber

or wonder woman's jet.

[whistle]

2. Out-sourcing torture is like hiring a hit-man to commit murder...

...on your behalf. So, any U.S. official who gave such an order or allowed such a policy to be put in place is equally guilty in the eyes of the law. Starting at the top, that would mean Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of War (Defense) and perhaps even higher to George W Bush himself.

[Virginian]

15. Are they telling us that...

these prisoners are being returned to their country of citizenship?

[NYC]

34. Exactly.

The person who hires the hit man cannot claim clean hands.

[psychopomp]

3. That would be this one

Thank you for another informative find, slad.

JetPhotos.Net Photo » Premiere Executive Transport Services Inc. Gulfstream V
http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=7982&PHPSESSID=b13ec39c4e1b3a70a8c585ad788ef940

[infusionman]

4. I'm surprised...

It hasn't been shot down

[seemslikeadream]

8. Nice photo psychopomp, could be the same one Markey was talking about?

"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.
more
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/11/30/markey_pledges_battle_on_rendition_practice_requests_details_on_local_firms_role/

[psychopomp]

20. It is the very one, apparently

I read more than post these days but would like you to know I find that you post some of the most provocative and informing articles, thanks.

[seemslikeadream]

27. Thanks psychopomp

:hi:

[Virginian]

14. Wow, same tail number and everything.

Thanks, but I almost got caught in the download stuff that website was trying to push.

[russian33]

5. But you have to look at the bright side

At least when these people are on their way to be tortured, they're traveling in style! ;)

[neweurope]

6. "often loading hooded and shackled suspects" - my goodness,

how many poor people are being tortured by the US?

[leftchick]

31. um.... Lots of people....

Welcome to the New Face of Fascism, USA style!

[ngGale]

35. We wouldn't know the answer to that question because...

it seems we have 'outsourced' torture along with everything else. We have a sick bunch of cookies in this administration.

[Laughing Mirror]

7. Why do we still have the CIA?

We know all the bad it's done and continues to do, but what good has it ever done? Why are we still putting up with the CIA, the DIA, the DEA, the FBI--I better stop before I run out of space.

[tinanator]

9. alphabet soup

not that they are any better than you say, but the dirtiest culprits, the real evil doers, have much less commonly known acronyms. They who must not be named, so to speak.

[Laughing Mirror]

24. Well the unmentionable have to have somebody do their dirty work for them

So yes, thank you for bringing the dirt back home to where it all begins, to the evil and vile whoever their names are for whom the alpha-betas actually do all their work for. For it is certainly not for us as citizens, mostly against us. COINTELPRO and crack cocaine is just on the top of my head, but we all know their good works. We all know that they are just apparatuses created to keep the national security state secure.

But except for some books and movies and my favorite bulldog La Cage aux Folles drag queen J. Edwina Hoover, what good ever came out of any of these agencies? Nothing much springs to mind. Just some of their brilliant minds who happened to be defectors, Sibel Edmonds, Chalmers Johnson and Daniel Elsberg, people like that.

[Minstrel Boy]

10. Don't miss this, from Cryptogon:

12/27/2004

The Torture Express: CIA Cut Out Operation Busted

Fast and loose doesn't begin to describe the manner in which the CIA uses aircraft tail numbers and the FAA Aircraft Registration database. It's almost as if they think nobody is watching. If the authors of the AFP piece had read, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed, they might have considered these possibilities. Compromised provides an excellent account of CIA air transport proprietaries and the associated tail number antics. See Chapter 7, Tail Numbers Game.

...

I just checked N8068V on the FAA database and it now comes up as a "deregistered" Robinson R22 BETA helicopter.

But there's just one problem...



Does that Gulfstream V look like a Robinson R22 BETA helicopter to you? Wave hello to the spooks and their busted cutout operation.

more

http://www.cryptogon.com/

:hi: seems

[seemslikeadream]

18. "I'm not at liberty to discuss the affairs of the client business,

Terror suspects' torture claims have Mass. link
Secrecy shrouds transfer jet
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | November 29, 2004

....

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.

...

"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."

...

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.

...

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.

...

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."

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

:hi: MB

[Prisonerohio]

11. I wonder how long it will be before they start using this with American

citizens. Famous activists mysteriously start leaving the country never to return.

[Jose Diablo]

17. Who would know if they already are doing this with American citizens

Without the right to a prompt public hearing, who's to say who they arrested and for what reason and when.

Without a Constitution to define what is permitted by the agents of the government, they can do anything they want that they can forcibly get away with. Just like pre-WWII Germany.

Without a Constitution, there is no law to define civil behavior.

I get a chuckle whenever I hear the legal eagles on this board discuss what we are permitted by law to do in regards to election fraud, yet blithely ignore the implications of election fraud done by agents of the government, and the implication in so far as Constitutional remedies, especially with a packed court.

Election Fraud is in effect overthrowing the Constitution and in that case, the electorate really has no choice but to either give-up and allow it, or fight the agents of the government that refuse to follow law.

We are a nation of laws, right? Or so those legal eagles tell us.

[seemslikeadream]

12. Details of US 'torture by proxy flights' emerge

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


Stephen Grey
The Times (UK)
November 14, 2004

...

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 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.

...

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."

...

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.

...

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.

...

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."

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

[Freebird12004]

13. yet another reason to stay home

and 'trust no one'

[eowyn_of_rohan]

16. Interesting results from googling....

The Dedham law firm of Hill & Plakias houses the legal address for Premier Executive Transport Services... 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.... Contact info: Dean P. Plakias, c/o Hill & Plakias - Suite #202, 339 Washington St. , Dedham, MA 02026-1815 • Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] email: dean (at) hillplakias.com
kcindymedia.org/newswire/display/1887/index.php
~~~~~
Dept of Justice
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1999
[phone]
WWW.USDOJ.GOV
TDD [phone]
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT REQUIRES FLEET FINANCIAL AND BANKBOSTON TO DIVEST 306 BRANCHES IN FOUR NEW ENGLAND STATES
$13.2 Billion Is Largest Bank Divestiture In History
(Among names)
Dedham 339 WASHINGTON ST DEDHAM MA 02026 NORFOLK
www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/1999/September/394at.htm
~~~~~~~~~
Some Businesses @ 339 Washington St,Dedham, MA:

Dedham Massachusetts Lawyers
Mary Banach -[phone]
Plakias, Dean P - Hill & Plakias - SUITE 202 - [phone]

CROWELL AVIATION -SUITE 202 "US 1989 20800153 N1016M P&W/PT6A SER
750 HorsePower

PREMIER EXECUTIVE TRANSPORT SERVICES INC - SUITE 202 - "US 2001 33010 N313P CFM INTL./CFM56 SERIES 2200 HorsePower"

North Star Mortgage Corp [phone] 339 Washington St Dedham, MA

~~~~~~~~~~~~
US companies that often flies/operate the plane:

Aero Contractor Ltd Johnson County Airport - Smithfield, North Carolina, USA STEVENS EXPRESS LEASING, INC. - 8130 COUNTRY VILLAGE, DRIVE S101, CORDOVA, Tennesee, USA

French source: another 'Black Jet': http://tinyurl.com/7x22n

Bush: "This could happen to you": http://tinyurl.com/7yf56

Dutch War Criminals in Court: http://tinyurl.com/662pp

FEMA and Concentrationcamps: http://tinyurl.com/63hua

Military Intelligence - Special Operations: Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5pe6g

The DIA and the military services maintain a large number of military attachés and a much smaller network of clandestine case officers to satisfy foreign intelligence requirements. The Defense HUMINT Service became operational October 1, 1995, to consolidate the human intelligence (HUMINT) capabilities of the DIA, Army, Navy, and Air Force.

[eowyn_of_rohan]

22. Crowell Aviation

FBO's in New Mexico
Crowell Aviation Las Vegas LVS [phone]
www.airsport.com/fbos/fbosnm.htm
~~~~~~~~
CIVIL AIRCRAFT LANDING PERMITS AS OF 1 August 2004
NAME - CROWELL AVIATION TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
CALP NUMBER - ASA-01-04-036
AIRFIELDS - Worldwide
CALP EXPIRATION -- Saturday, March 26, 2005
~~~~~~~~~
Air Traffic Control New Mexico, Area code 505 business listing
Crowell Aviation 505-454-0190 901 Airport Rd Las Vegas NM 87701
www.gy.com/biz/488111/505.htm (What th... gy.com - health foods, computer software, aviation control?

[eowyn_of_rohan]

19. RE Hill and Plakias

Most (in Dedham, Massachusetts] 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.

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 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.

kmarx.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_kmarx_archive.html

[seemslikeadream]

21. Thanks eowyn_of_rohan

:hi: We've survived the attack of the bozos!!!

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

...

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.

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


CIA's plane is secret, except at airports or on the Web
Jet that carries terror suspects spotted often
By DANA PRIEST
The Washington Post
December 28. 2004 8:00AM


Rare glimpse into CIA's work

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

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, Pakistan; 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.

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, Va., Oakton, Va., Chevy Chase, Md., and the District of Columbia. 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.
more
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041228/REPOSITORY/412280340/1013/NEWS03

[eowyn_of_rohan]

23. Hey there !

Peaceful, isn't it? I can't be doing this, though OH how I want to. I have a big party here at 5pm. still in jammies.:party:

adding this: Here is another research "opportunity"!
New Media Comm. - Have we looked into these guys yet?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=201647&mesg_id=201647

[JohnnyRingo]

25. Oddly enough...N379P doesn't show up in a registration search

http://162.58.35.241/acdatabase/acmain.htm

"Not registered or reserved".

[DFWJock]

26. The cargo hull

is full of ballots from Florida.

[LiberalHeart]

28. Connection to Flight 93?

Here is what a witness said about the white jet seem on 9/11 near Shanksville, PA, when Flight 93 went 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.
______________________

Doesn't that description sound a lot like the jet pictured on the link posted above at http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=7982&PHPSESSID=b13ec39c4e1b3a70a8c585ad788ef940 ?

It would be interesting to show that witness this photo and hear what she has to say.

[LiberalHeart]

29. Kick ... hoping for feedback....

....regarding the possibility of the jet description from 9/11 matching the ghost jet.

[seemslikeadream]

30. Just who is Leonard Thomas Bayard?

CIA intrigue shadows jet
A 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?


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.
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/business/1104325591194700.xml

[LiberalHeart]

32. Leonard Bayard

From http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=5844 :

Portland lawyer Scott D. Caplan showed up in a Dec. 9 Boston Globe article about a jet alleged to have transported al Qaeda suspects to Egypt so they could be tortured. The Globe reported that the jet was recently sold between two possible U.S. government front companies--with the new owner headquartered in Caplan's downtown law office. The state lists Caplan as the registered agent for the company, Bayard Foreign Marketing, a company whose only listed officer is "Leonard T. Bayard." A nationwide public-records database search comes up with no such name, though there is a painting contractor in Helena, Mont., who is listed both as Leonard Bayard--no middle initial--and as Bayard B. Leonard. Hmm....

http://www.lq.ca/issues/winter2001/articles/article17.html :
Could be a Canadian; the photo would load for me.

http://hellohelena.com/YP/c_CONTRACTORSPAINTINGRESIDE.Cfm

[seemslikeadream]

33. US flights to ‘torture prisons’ refuelled at Prestwick

HUMAN rights campaigners reacted furiously yesterday to revelations that Scotland has been used as a refuelling base for a jet being used by American intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to countries that torture prisoners.
Former CIA officers and human rights agencies say the prisoners are sent to countries such as Egypt and Jordan where they are tortured to gain information for the Americans.

...

However, John Scott, of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said: "If we are refuelling planes and allowing them to touch down for whatever purposes we continue to be complicit in torture.
"It is like the resetter being as bad as the thief because without the resetter there would be no thief.
"If the American government wasn't given support internationally for its policy of torture it would, at the very least, have to be amended or modified and would not be able to take place on such a widespread scale without the co-operation, sadly, of governments like our own."
The white jet was, until earlier this month, owned by Premier Executive Transport Services Inc and according to research by the Washington Post the company's directors exist only on paper.
The stop it made at Prestwick was one of several in the UK. There was outrage by human rights campaigners in Ireland when it was discovered the aircraft had made several flights via Shannon airport.
HUMAN rights campaigners reacted furiously yesterday to revelations that Scotland has been used as a refuelling base for a jet being used by American intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to countries that torture prisoners.

...

However, John Scott, of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said: "If we are refuelling planes and allowing them to touch down for whatever purposes we continue to be complicit in torture.

more
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/30618.html

[sleipnir]

36. I saw an amazing puppet show about this two weeks ago.

I'm serious, it was quite a good show, in NYC that dealt exactly with this company and incident. The puppets were shadow puppets that were modified to reflect off of an overhead projector. Quite the amazing piece, something spread the truth, but with a vivid edge of imagination and strength.

The story is amazing in the details that have evolved over the past several months.

[FDRrocks]

37. Jail 'em in Cuba without charges, fly them to other nations to torture....

Globalization is showing its many facets.

[aikido15]

38. The London Daily Mirror broke this story....

Over a month ago...no one would run it in the US media, surprise, surprise.

[FDRrocks]

39. I used to rationalize the medias stupidity on the

basic that the outlets were dedicated to the bottom-line of the company that owned them. Now it seems that they just want to facilitate this bullshit, in hopes of future benefits.

It's just like when the US press was having a love-fest over the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, before they tried to take Poland.

"What? Hitler hostilely took over 3 countries while being facilitated by appeasers? What a glorious triumph of capitalism!"

[LiberalHeart]

40. Remember some funny business about a plane.....

....a while back, maybe in the spring or summer, when some guys who claimed they were going on a mission to mine for diamonds were on a plane somewhere (Angola, maybe?) and got arrested before they could take off. As the story went, they were mercenaries. Margaret Thatcher's son was tied into it some how, as well as some UK firm that provided private militias for a fee. There was an effort to track down the ownership of the plane, but it got awfully murky. It had passed into new hands, but not into a new registration, so a search for the registration came back to some guys in the US who supposedly buy retired military planes and put them into private hands whether by lease or sale.

In this case, the new owner, who had not yet registered the plane, was supposedly using it for commercial holiday excusions (that was the cover story)under the banner of a business that did not appear to exist. It hardly sounded ideal for vacation getaways. The interior was gutted to make room for lots of guys to sit on the floor, with space left over for all the tools (weapons?) they needed. The plane people were also involved in the business of overthrowing foreign leaders on a contract basis. I did a lot of reading about these shadowy outfits at the time but by now I've forgotten nearly all I used to know about them. But bottom line, the whole deal looked like a CIA operation. Getting info on that plane seemed to be about as hard as it is to pin down information on this ghost plane.

[FDRrocks]

41. It's seems the obvious result if you extrapolate

the capitalist mindset. Of course, no one saw it getting this bad. But then again, Russians didn't see 50 million people being murdered when they revolted against the ruling class, and Germans didn't see the 6 million Jews and untold amounts of innocents and military that would die as a result of thier reaction to humiliation.

This world is a sad, sad place.

[aikido15]

43. Yes it is...

and getting worse and more sad by the second! ugh.

[aikido15]

42. I remember that story...

with Thatcher's son...hum...interesting.