"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine." - - - William Blum

March 21, 2005


I never thought I'd see a story like this (snippet)...

Jet's travels cloaked in mystery - Red Sox partner's plane hits spots U.S. sent terror suspects

By John Crewdson and Tom Hundley
Tribune correspondents - Published March 20, 2005

Last June, the Boston Red Sox chartered an executive jet to help their manager make a quick visit home in the midst of the team's championship season.

But what was the very same Gulfstream--owned by one of the Red Sox's partners, but presumably without the team's logo on its fuselage--doing in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003?

Perhaps by coincidence, Feb. 18, 2003, was the day an Islamic preacher known as Abu Omar, who had been abducted in Italy the previous day and forced aboard a small plane, also arrived at the Cairo airport.

Omar, whose given name is Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, was imprisoned by the Egyptians and, he claims, brutally tortured. The public prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, who is investigating Omar's apparent kidnapping, expects to file charges within a few days, according to an Italian official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Spataro made headlines last month when, attempting to identify the plane that transported Omar from Italy to Egypt, he served a warrant on the Italian commander of the air base at Aviano, Italy, which is home to the U.S. Air Force's 31st Fighter Wing.

Spataro declines to say whether the Gulfstream that landed in Cairo, which bore the tail number N85VM, departed from Aviano around the time of Omar's disappearance.

But Federal Aviation Administration records obtained by the Tribune show that Gulfstream N85VM has been many places around the world that the Red Sox have almost certainly never gone.

Between June 2002 and January of this year, the Gulfstream made 51 visits to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, site of the U.S. naval base where more than 500 terrorism suspects are behind bars.

During the same period, the plane recorded 82 visits to Washington's Dulles International Airport as well as landings at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., outside the capital and the U.S. air bases at Ramstein and Rhein-Main in Germany.

The plane's flight log also shows visits to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.

Egypt, Afghanistan, Jordan and Morocco are among the countries to which the U.S. is known to have "rendered" terrorism suspects. Under the increasingly controversial practice of "rendition," terrorism suspects arrested abroad have been forcibly returned to their native countries for interrogation, sometimes with methods that are barred by U.S. law.

The New York Times reported last month that, days after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush authorized the CIA to transfer suspects to third countries without obtaining separate presidential approval in each instance.

Reacting to media disclosures of some renditions in which the suspects later were found to have no terrorist connections, the House of Representatives last week voted 420-2 to prohibit the use of federal money for sending detainees to countries that practice torture....

Yep, a plane owned by Boston Red Sox owner was used to transport prisoners aound the world for torture. Wake up, sheeple. The Bush-war Administration is making a mockery of our America.

No comments: