Flight To Torture - Where
Abuse Is Contracted
Out
By Tim
Reid
The Times - UK
3-26-5
- On the night of December 18, 2001, a Gulfstream jet,
tail number N379P, landed at Bromma Airport in Stockholm carrying eight
hooded Americans in business suits.
-
- They took custody of two Egyptian terrorist suspects,
Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who had been arrested that day by
Swedish security police. They cut off their clothes, handcuffed them,
inserted sedative suppositories, put nappies and dark overalls,
blindfolds and hoods on them and bundled them on to the jet. The
operation took just 30 minutes.
-
- At 2.35am next day, the jet, after refuelling at
Dulles airport in Washington, landed in Cairo and the suspects were
handed to Egyptian authorities. Then, they vanished.
-
- The operation was part of the CIA's highly secret and
increasingly controversial practice of "extraordinary rendition", where
terrorist suspects, some snatched off streets in daylight, are sent
abroad for interrogation, often to countries with a record of using
torture.
-
- In recent weeks several former detainees have come
forward and a picture is emerging of a global network, sanctioned by
President Bush, of private jets owned by bogus companies, CIA snatch
squads armed with drugs and mace spray and nighttime flights to Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and Afghanistan.
-
- The Stockholm operation came to light after Paul
Forrell, a police inspector on duty at the airport, gave a detailed
account to the Swedish media. When the Swedish ambassador tracked the
two men down to a Cairo jail five weeks later, they claimed they had
been tortured. Al-Zery was eventually released. Agiza was sentenced to
25 years for membership of a radical Egyptian organisation.
-
- The US Congress has uncovered many other cases. Mr
Bush has, for the first time, admitted sending terrorist suspects abroad
for interrogation, and authorities in Sweden, Italy and Germany are
investigating alleged CIA kidnappings on their own soil.
-
- Khalid el-Masri, a German national whose story is
confirmed by German officials, says he was arrested on the Macedonian
border on New Year's Eve, 2003. After being held for three weeks by
Macedonian officials who pressed him to admit that he was an al- Qaeda
member, he was driven to Skopje airport, beaten, stripped, shackled and
flown to Baghdad, and then to Kabul.
-
- El-Masri says he woke in a jail cell and was told:
"You're in a country without laws and no one knows you are here." After
being held for five months in solitary confinement, he was flown back to
the Balkans last May and dumped on a hillside, where Macedonian border
guards returned his passport and cash.
-
- German investigators have checked the flight logs of a
US-registered Boeing 737, which show that it arrived in Skopje at 9pm on
January 23, last year, leaving six hours later for Kabul via
Baghdad.
-
- El-Masri, whose lawyer believes was seized because his
name is similar to an al-Qaeda member, provided German police with the
same times and dates.
-
- The jet is owned by Premier Executive Transport
Services. A CBS 60 Minutes investigation found that it had made at least
600 flights to 40 countries since the World Trade Centre attacks,
including 10 to Uzbekistan, 30 to Jordan, 19 to Afghanistan, 17 to
Morocco and 16 to Iraq.
-
- Abu Omar, a radical Egyptian cleric, said in a phone
call to his wife, monitored by Italian police, that on February 17,
2003, he was snatched off a Milan street by two men, sprayed in the face
with chemicals and taken to a US airbase in Italy before being flown
aboard a Gulfstream jet to Cairo, where he was tortured and beaten. He
has not been seen since.
-
- Armado Sparato, an anti- Mafia prosecutor, served a
warrant last week on the Italian commander of the airbase at Aviano,
home to the US Air Force's 31st Fighter Wing.
-
- Between June 2002 and January this year, the jet made
51 visits to Guantanamo Bay and trips to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai,
Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland and Azerbaijan.
-
- Rendition was begun under President Reagan but was
used sparingly. After the September 11 attacks, Mr Bush gave the CIA
wide licence to send terrorist suspects abroad without prior approval.
Off the record, officials say that 150-200 suspects have been rendered
since then.
-
- Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
-
- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1542390,00.html
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