Elusive jet may hold clue to secret prisons
Mystery Gulfstream landed in Romania
By John Crewdson
Tribune senior correspondent
Published September 13, 2006
BUCHAREST, Romania -- The unmarked executive jet was a little too high on its final approach to Bucharest's Baneasa airport, the plane's wheels touching the runway a few seconds later than they should have. The Gulfstream 4, which bore the U.S. registration number N478GS, rolled onto an area of the runway that was under construction, snapping its left-side landing gear and rupturing a fuel tank inside the left wing. While investigators said the damage was "substantial," none of the plane's passengers was injured. Ordinarily, it would have been just one of a half-dozen or so non-fatal aircraft mishaps that occur each year in this East European country, where decades of Soviet domination have been replaced by a democratic government that now enjoys excellent relations with the U.S. But the flight's origins in Afghanistan, the Gulfstream's veiled ownership by apparent front companies, the failure to make European investigators aware of the ill-fated flight and the still-undisclosed identities and fates of the seven passengers offer possible clues to the persistent riddle of which friendly foreign countries have allowed the U.S. to hide suspected terrorists on their soil.
Romanian transport ministry documents show that Gulfstream N478GS arrived in Bucharest on the afternoon of Dec. 6, 2004, from Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base, where the U.S. operates a well-documented detention facility for enemy combatants. As the only direct flight on record from Bagram to Bucharest, the journey of Gulfstream N478GS has captured the attention of investigators for both the Council of Europe and the Romanian parliament, who for months have been examining flights as part of their effort to learn whether--and now where--the CIA established clandestine prisons for key leaders of Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups. In President Bush's surprise acknowledgment last week that the CIA has been stashing key members of Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups outside the U.S. since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he carefully avoided disclosing where those prisons were located--and in some cases still are located, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official who asked not to be identified.
"Where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement cannot be divulged," Bush declared. "Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country." The issue nevertheless has become critical for the European Parliament, which worries that, in cooperating with the CIA, some European Union countries may have violated the EU's strict prohibitions against infringing human rights and the obligation of member nations to provide public trials for criminal suspects. While admitting that it has no conclusive evidence, an inquiry by the 46-member Council of Europe in June singled out Poland, which is a member of the European Union, and especially Romania, which is due to join the EU in two years, as the two most likely locales for secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. "Romania is thus far the only Council of Europe member State . . . which bears all the characteristics of a detainee transfer or drop-off point," the council concluded in a preliminary report. Bush's announcement brought fresh denials from Romania and Poland that they had permitted the U.S. to hide suspected terrorists beyond the oversight of the courts, the International Committee of the Red Cross and human-rights groups.
But the president's acknowledgement that such prisons have in fact existed has given new life to Europe's concerns. Claudio Fava, who is conducting a separate investigation on behalf of the European Parliament, says he was told by senior Bush administration officials during a visit to Washington last spring that there were two clandestine prisons in Eastern Europe but was not told the specific locations. Fava says his committee now plans to visit Poland and Romania in October, armed with fresh questions. "Bush has confirmed our work with his speech," he said in a telephone interview last week. "Now we have more reasons to ask questions. We need now some answers from the governments of Poland and Romania. Until now there has been only silence." That silence, it seems, has been especially profound concerning the Bagram-to-Bucharest flight that ended with the runway accident, and the seven passengers and three crew members it reportedly carried.
more:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0609130176sep13,1,3423926.story
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