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The Right way to Interrogate Blood-thirsty
Terrorists When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to
transport a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to
interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often
does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after
the capture of a prized terrorist, a plane will depart Johnston
County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the
C.I.A. team on the way.
Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out
renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing
terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be
detained in another, including countries that routinely use unorthodox information acquisition techniques for the debriefing of these
thick-skinned hardboiled Terrorists. Some of whom are literally given
the wet heat treatment to make them squeal in detention facilities at
unlikeliest of places like Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Libya.
Lifestyle_____________________
Aero Contractors' planes, which has played a stellar role in the
fight against terrorism, has dropped C.I.A. paramilitary officers
into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi,
Pakistan, right after the United States Consulate there was bombed in
2002; and flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, (according to
flight data and other records) the day before an American-held
terrorist said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last
year. Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out
renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing
terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be
detained in another, including countries that routinely use unorthodox information acquisition techniques for the debriefing of these
thick-skinned hardboiled Terrorists. Some of whom are literally given
the wet heat treatment to make them squeal in detention facilities at
unlikeliest of places like Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Libya.
"Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and
come out in the middle of the night with another," said a former
pilot. He asked not to be identified because when he was hired, after
responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the
C.I.A., he signed a secrecy agreement. An agreement which the traitor
imagined he would not be violating by disclosing the operation, but
hiding his name to save his skin from legal action. Since 2001, the
battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.'s air
operations. Aero's staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004,
according to Dun and Bradstreet. Despite the difficulty of
determining the purpose of any single flight or who was aboard, the
pattern of flights that coincide with known events is
striking. When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of
Dec. 13, 2003, a Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from
Dulles Airport in Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day
by the Boeing Business Jet, also flying from Washington. Flights on
this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were the
first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad
since the beginning of the war. Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane
left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda
leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included
Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28,
2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany,
on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational
chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003. A jet also
arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after
the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a
propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the
capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani. Flight records
sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar
Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan
intelligence service officers appeared in September in an
interrogation cell. Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim
that the Libyan interrogators questioned him and threatened his life.
But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A.
shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8,
the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents.
The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the
Johnston County Airport, flight records show. The same Gulfstream has
been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news
reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and
Gambia. So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A.
prudently uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in
casual checks of F.A.A. registrations. On closer examination,
however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no
premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers'
offices - a smart move indeed when fighting enemies who have no
morals, no qualms while sawing off peoples heads, mailing anthrax,
blowing off pubs and school buses while fighting an asymmetric war.
The officers and directors, of these airline companies listed in
state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of
public records for ordinary identifying information about the
officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on -
comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and
Washington, D.C. This is necessary to fox the 5th columnists in the
US who would want to scuttle the war effort. Story Credits: New
York Times
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