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by CD Stelzer
Instead, the asylum seekers had been kidnapped by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, while Swedish authorities turned a blind eye. The Americans made no pretense of abiding by any laws or diplomatic niceties. No extradition papers were served. No arrest warrants issued. Zery and Agiza, having been deemed terrorist suspects by the US, were snatched as a part of a covert CIA operation euphemistically referred to as 'extraordinary rendition'. Piecing together evidence, human rights advocates conservatively estimate that there have been at least 150 similar abductions since 9/11, though the exact number of cases is impossible to ascertain and may be many times higher. In Sweden and elsewhere, the precise identity of the captors remains unclear, too. But their methods are always the same. After snaring their prey, a team of black clad, masked, abductors strip, drug, blindfold, manacle, diaper, and, finally, dress their victims in orange jumpsuits. Once in Egyptian custody, Zery and Agiza underwent interrogation that allegedly involved torture, including electrical shocks to the genitals. Ultimately, The Egyptian Supreme Military Court meted out a 25-year sentence to Agiza for his alleged ties to an armed Islamic faction. The harsh sentence came despite the defendant's renunciation of violence while in exile. President Hosni Mubarak later reduced the sentence to 15 years. Zery, on the other hand, was released without charge - after being imprisoned under abysmal conditions for two years. Ireland has become a staging ground for such abductions, a hub for the CIA's flight plan to perdition. The aeroplane used to fly these men to Cairo, where they were handed over to Egypt's brutal secret police, landed at Shannon Airport 22 times between February 2001 and September 2005, according to aviation records compiled by Amnesty International. In a report issued in April, the human rights agency listed a total of 77 landings by the Gulfstream V and three other CIA-linked aircraft at Shannon. Irish anti-war activists have duly reported many sightings of these and other suspicious aircraft at Shannon. So far the reaction of the Government has been to condemn the possibility of such reprehensible behaviour, while accepting US denials of wrongdoing. This apparent duplicity is exemplified by the stance of Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern, who has evaded responsibility by adopting a see-no-evil attitude. Ahern has told the media in recent months that there is no reason to search the suspect planes for evidence of kidnapping or other US malfeasance "because we have received categorical assurances from the US that they are not using Shannon in this way". A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry reiterated those assurances to Island in late May. US President George W. Bush and other members of his regime have repeatedly mouthed those assurances. On 25 January 2005, for instance, the US president told the New York Times that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture". Bush reiterated that promise at a White House press conference last April, saying: "It's in our interest to find those who would do harm to us, and we will do so within the law, ... honouring our commitment not to torture people. And we expect the countries where we send somebody to not torture, as well". During her European tour in December, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "the United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured". Rice added: "Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured". When asked for a clarification of the Government's position last month, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry cited the US secretary of state's guarantees. "In relation to the issue of extraordinary rendition, the response again emphasises the clear, categorical and unqualified character of the assurances the Government has repeatedly received from the US authorities, including Secretary of State Rice, that prisoners have not been transferred through Irish territory, nor would they be, without our permission". Despite diplomatic assurances on both sides of the Atlantic, however, the torture flights, as they are sometimes called, have apparently continued unabated - with Shannon playing an integral part in the operation. Indeed, reliance on assurances from duplicitous nation states that are party to the 'renditions' seems part of the strategy to circumvent inter-national, European, and American laws. Due to the CIA's use of privately registered planes, the Irish government has so far neglected to search suspected aircraft at Shannon, citing a clause within the Convention on International Civil Aviation (the Chicago Convention), which allows non-commercial flights to cross international borders and make stops without prior authorisation or notice. It is a loophole in the law big enough to allow the CIA to fly a fleet of more than two dozen aircraft through European airspace with absolutely no oversight. Shannon is often the logical choice for refuelling because it is the westernmost air facility among European Union states, and already utilised as a pit stop by the American military. Amnesty International has tracked more than 2,600 flights over the last five years that are directly or indirectly related to CIA covert operations. Most of these flights crossed through European airspace, often stopping at one or more airports. Of those flights, nearly 1,000 have been directly linked to the CIA. About 600 are tied to CIA-linked aircraft that have been used on an interim basis. The last category - more than 1,000 flights - is reserved for aircraft associated with CIA front companies. The actual number of flights and their respective objectives remain an enigma because of secrecy surrounding CIA operations and the limited information available to the human rights and anti-war activists attempting to monitor the situation. In a report to the Council of Europe earlier this year, Foreign Minister Ahern affirmed the Government's opposition to 'extraordinary rendition'. The report also states that Irish authorities have the right under international law to board civil aircraft to investigate possible human rights abuses, but thus far such allegations have been deemed unwarranted by officials of An Garda S’ochána. Moreover, the Office of the Foreign Minister claims that all of the alleged CIA flights that have stopped at Shannon have been recorded, according to regular procedures. But some available numbers still don't seem to add up. US Federal Aviation Authority data compiled by Amnesty International shows that two planes owned by a CIA front company landed 50 times at Shannon Airport between 2001 and 2005.
But the same records indicate a total of only 35 take offs for the same aircraft. The CIA started the rendition programme under a directive signed by former US President Bill Clinton in 1995. Its purpose: to quickly apprehend and interrogate alleged terrorists. An ancillary objective was to keep them locked up to prevent future terrorist acts. In the wake of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, the CIA opted to use any means necessary, including torture, to meet these ends. The agency also wanted to prevent suspected terrorists from gaining access to the US criminal justice system, through which defence attorneys could use subpoenas to pry into the agency's darkest secrets. To accomplish these goals and still retain plausible deniability, the CIA chose to use proxies. Abductees have been dispatched to prisons in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and elsewhere, where torture is routinely employed by secret services to extract information from prisoners. The use of Syria for these purposes is ironic in that the US has charged that country with being a sponsor of terrorism. As former CIA agent Michael Scheuer, who helped create the rendition programme, told the New York Times last year, the agency "preferred to let other countries do our dirty work". In an interview with British journalist Stephen Grey, another retired agent explained it this way: "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 - never see them again - you send them to Egypt". After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration ordered the CIA to boost its efforts. As a result, increasing numbers of flights have carried abductees to a squalid prison in Afghanistan or the detention camp at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where approximately 550 detainees are still being held. The US has acknowledged that about 30 so-called 'high-value detainees' have simply disappeared after being captured. Amnesty International estimates that for each of these acknowledged dis-appearances there are perhaps hundreds more that have gone unreported. Moreover, the human rights organisation claims that the CIA has operated its own secret prisons, so-called 'black sites,' in at least eight countries. In a report issued last year, Human Rights Watch, another monitoring organisation, alleged that abductees are being held in Romania and Poland. To date, European investigators have been unable to substantiate this claim. But this spring the CIA added credence to the claim by firing a CIA analyst for allegedly leaking information on European 'black sites' to the Washington Post. Other suspected locations of the secret prisons include: Turkey, Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina and the Slovak Republic. Evidence suggests the CIA rendition programme is part of broader US operations that engage the US Defence Department and White House. A former CIA agent revealed to the Chicago Tribune last year, for example, that the Gulfstream V jet, used in the Swedish abductions and other kidnappings, was operated by the Joint Special Operations Command, an inter-agency unit that coordinates counter-terrorism actions between the CIA and US military. The same CIA-linked plane is listed as doing business with the US Navy Engineering Logistics Office, a secret military intelligence agency. Landing permits for US airbases and US Defence Department fuelling contracts also connect the CIA rendition programme to the US military. More telling is the direct intercession by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a rendition case. In May 2004, as White House national security advisor, Rice ordered the release of Khaled el-Masri, a 42-year-old German citizen of Lebanese descent, mistakenly abducted by the CIA in Macedonia. After Rice interceded, el-Masri was subsequently transported from an Afghan dungeon, known as the Salt Pit, and freed in Albania. Whereas, CIA covert operations may technically be beyond the purview of international laws, knowledge and participation of US military personnel and executive branch officials is not. This prospect places the US government and those individuals who have participated in the rendition programme in potential violation of the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention Against Torture and other laws. After it gained worldwide notoriety, the CIA passed the Gulfstream V to N126CH Inc, a Miami-based company in late 2005. The company's name is the same as the aircraft's new tail number. This is not the first time that the ownership and tail numbers have switched. Before the latest transfer, the plane was passed from one CIA front company to another, changing tail numbers twice in the process. Records indicate that Premier Executive Transport Services, a Massachusetts corporation that folded in late 2004, transferred registration of the plane to Oregon-based Bayard Foreign Marketing, another phantom company. Besides landing at Shannon 22 times, the plane's destinations have included: Guantanamo Bay Cuba, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Gambia, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Pakistan, Qatar, Morocco, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan, as well as countries throughout Europe. The previously cited case of mistaken identity demonstrates how a rendition can easily go awry. On New Year's Eve 2003, while on holiday, el-Masri was seized at the Macedonian-Serbian frontier. The unemployed car salesman and father of five from Neu-Ulm, Germany, had travelled to the Balkans on a spree, after having a row with his wife. Assuming his passport was a forgery, the Macedonian police reported him as an al Qaeda suspect to the CIA station in Skopje. On or about 24 January 2004, a CIA rendition team, bundled el-Masri aboard a Boeing 737 bound for Afghanistan, where he was tortured for months before being released. Like the Gulfstream V, the 737 belonged to Premier Executive Transport Services. The same plane reputedly flew from Afghanistan to Poland and Romania twice in 2003 and 2004, leading Human Rights Watch to suspect those countries of harbouring CIA black sites. The 737 also passed through Dublin Airport twice and Shannon 23 times in the past five years. In December 2004, the now-defunct Premier Executive Transport Services handed the plane over to Keeler & Tate Management, yet another CIA front company in-corporated in Nevada. Corporate records list the only real person connected to Keeler & Tate as solicitor Frank R. Petersen, who shares his Reno, Nevada office with Peter Laxalt, the brother and business partner of former US Senator Paul Laxalt, a confidant of the late US President Ronald Reagan. Since retiring from the public office in 1987, Paul Laxalt has headed an influential Washington D.C. lobbying firm. In recent years, besides its private clients, the Paul Laxalt Group has represented the US Defence, State and Justice Departments. Public records also show the Executive Office of the President (the White House) hired the Laxalt Group for unspecified reasons in 2003. In a suit recently rejected in US federal court, the American Civil Liberties Union sought to sue former CIA Director George Tenet on behalf of el-Masri. The other plaintiffs were Premier, its successor Keeler & Tate and Aero Contractors Ltd of North Carolina. Some Aero employees are reported to have past connections to Air America, the notorious CIA airline of the Vietnam War era. The abduction of Islamic cleric Hasan Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from Milan in February 2003 illustrates just how tangled the web of affiliates involved in the rendition programme can be. After the kidnapping, pilots of CIA-linked Aero Contractors flew Omar to Egypt in a Gulfstream IV aircraft leased by Richmor Aviation of Hudson, New York. FAA registration records, however, list the actual owner of the plane as Assembly Point Aviation Inc of Glens Falls, New York. The chairman and sole officer of Assembly Point Aviation is Robert Morse, part owner in the Boston Red Sox professional baseball team. If Omar's flight to Egypt is a reliable indicator, it would be reasonable to deduce that this gaggle of private and CIA front companies is making a tidy profit off the rendition programme at US taxpayer's expense. Richmor Aviation, for example, leases the plane on behalf of its owner for $5,365 an hour, or a little more than $900,000 a week, according to the Boston Globe. Aside from free rides given to kidnap victims bound for torture chambers in the Middle East, not too many people could afford such luxurious air travel. One notable passenger granted the privilege without being shackled or diapered is former President George H. W. Bush, the current US leader's father, who accompanied Morse on a leisurely trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York a few years ago. If that were not a strange enough coincidence, consider the diversified interests of Richmor Aviation. Besides leasing and maintenance, Richmor also operates a flight training school. One of its dropouts, from the early 1990s, was Abdul Hakim Murad, an associate of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a lieutenant of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. Philippine authorities arrested Murad in Manila in 1995. He was later convicted in New York for plotting to blow up a dozen US commercial passenger jets over the Pacific and then crash a plane into CIA headquarters. To date only one country has taken serious steps to reveal these intricate machinations. At press time, Italy's case against 22 CIA agents charged in the Omar kidnapping case is slowly moving forward after stalling out temporarily in the wake of this spring's contested national elections. Those indicted include former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady. Prosecutor Armando Spataro has vowed to continue pursuing the case now that the centre-left government of Prime Minister-elect Roman Prodi is in power. Investigations of the rendition cases elsewhere have fared even worse, with no prosecutions foreseen in the offing. The tepid response may be intentional. There is cause to suspect that European governments are dragging their bureaucratic feet on the rendition issue because they have quietly cooperated on one level or another with US efforts. In February, law enforcement authorities in Munich initiated an inquiry into whether Germany had foreknowledge or tacitly approved the CIA kidnapping of el-Masri, a German citizen. The investigation is based on the victim's recollection that a German police official interviewed him three times while he was imprisoned in Afghanistan. Officials in the governments of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder have repeatedly denied any knowledge of the abduction and pressed counterparts in Washington to divulge information concerning the case. The German doubletalk is not the only national voice lacking in candour. In December, the British press documented extensive CIA use of airbases throughout the United Kingdom, exposing earlier official denials. Such revelations, if they continue to mount, could lead to a political furore. But that hasn't happened. Instead, an investigative report published by the Council of Europe in January failed to break any new ground. That Prime Minister Tony Blair chaired the Council's rotating presidency in the midst of the vapid inquiry gives an appearance of a conflict of interest. Blair is Bush's strongest ally, of course, and the CIA rendition flights are now known to have frequented the UK regularly. Nevertheless, Blair's former Foreign Minister Jack Straw feigned ignorance, publicly requesting that the US clarify whether CIA rendition flights used European airports - while the stifled investigation by Council rapporteur Dick Marty went nowhere. The Venice Commission, legal advisor for the Council of Europe, has recommended that member states must inspect aircraft if there are 'serious reasons' to suspect prisoners onboard are bound for destinations where they will be tortured. But despite the urging of the Council officials, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's government has only paid lip service to the idea. In May, the United Nations Committee Against Torture strongly recommended that the US close any prisons known to engage in torture, including the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The committee had ruled in May 2005 that Sweden had violated international law by permitting the United States to render asylum seeker Ahmed Hussein Agiza to Egypt in December 2001 in the agency's Gulfstream V, which then displayed the infamous tail number N379P. A lot of time has passed since then. By now the names of some of the front companies have changed and the tail numbers of the spy planes, too. But one thing hasn't. The CIA's birds of prey still roost at Shannon.
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