ZGram - 12/27/2004 - "Jet Is an Open Secret in Terror War"
zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
Wed Dec 29 07:12:35 EST 2004
Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny: Now more than ever!
December 27, 2004
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
For the next two days, my Zgrams will focus on the so-called "terror
war" - and how it impacts on those who are incarcerated without
charges or else have simply disappeared, just as in Argentina in the
'70s:
[START]
Jet Is an Open Secret in Terror War
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A01
The airplane is a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and
celebrities. But since 2001 it has been seen at military airports
from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by
hooded and handcuffed passengers.
The plane's owner of record, Premier Executive Transport Services
Inc., lists directors and officers who appear to exist only on paper.
And each one of those directors and officers has a recently issued
Social Security number and an address consisting only of a post
office box, according to an extensive search of state, federal and
commercial records.
Bryan P. Dyess, Steven E. Kent, Timothy R. Sperling and Audrey M.
Tailor are names without residential, work, telephone or corporate
histories -- just the kind of "sterile identities," said current and
former intelligence officials, that the CIA uses to conceal
involvement in clandestine operations. In this case, the agency is
flying captured terrorist suspects from one country to another for
detention and interrogation.
The CIA calls this activity "rendition." Premier Executive's
Gulfstream helps make it possible. According to civilian aircraft
landing permits, the jet has permission to use U.S. military
airfields worldwide.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, secret renditions have become a principal
weapon in the CIA's arsenal against suspected al Qaeda terrorists,
according to congressional testimony by CIA officials. But as the
practice has grown, the agency has had significantly more difficulty
keeping it secret.
According to airport officials, public documents and hobbyist plane
spotters, the Gulfstream V, with tail number N379P, has been used to
whisk detainees into or out of Jakarta, Indonesia; Pakistan; Egypt;
and Sweden, usually at night, and has landed at well-known U.S.
government refueling stops.
As the outlines of the rendition system have been revealed, criticism
of the practice has grown. Human rights groups are working on legal
challenges to renditions, said Morton Sklar, executive director of
the World Organization for Human Rights USA, because one of their
purposes is to transfer captives to countries that use harsh
interrogation methods outlawed in the United States. That, he said,
is prohibited by the U.N. Convention on Torture.
The CIA has the authority to carry out renditions under a
presidential directive dating to the Clinton administration, which
the Bush administration has reviewed and renewed. The CIA declined to
comment for this article.
"Our policymakers would never confront the issue," said Michael
Scheuer, a former CIA counterterrorism officer who has been involved
with renditions and supports the practice. "We would say, 'Where do
you want us to take these people?' The mind-set of the bureaucracy
was, 'Let someone else do the dirty work.' "
The story of the Gulfstream V offers a rare glimpse into the CIA's
secret operations, a world that current and former CIA officers said
should not have been so easy to document.
Not only have the plane's movements been tracked around the world,
but the on-paper officers of Premier Executive Transport Services are
also connected to a larger roster of false identities.
Each of the officers of Premier Executive is linked in public records
to one of five post office box numbers in Arlington, Oakton, Chevy
Chase and the District. A total of 325 names are registered to the
five post office boxes.
An extensive database search of a sample of 44 of those names turned
up none of the information that usually emerges in such a search: no
previous addresses, no past or current telephone numbers, no business
or corporate records. In addition, although most names were attached
to dates of birth in the 1940s, '50s or '60s, all were given Social
Security numbers between 1998 and 2003.
The Washington Post showed its research to the CIA, including a chart
connecting Premier Executive's officers, the post office boxes, the
325 names, the recent Social Security numbers and an entity called
Executive Support OFC. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
According to former CIA operatives experienced in using
"proprietary," or front, companies, the CIA likely used, or intended
to use, some of the 325 names to hide other activities, the nature of
which could not be learned. The former operatives also noted that the
agency devotes more effort to producing cover identities for its
operatives in the field, which are supposed to stand up under
scrutiny, than to hiding its ownership of a plane.
The CIA's plane secret began to unravel less than six weeks after the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
On Oct. 26, 2001, Masood Anwar, a Pakistani journalist with the News
in Islamabad, broke a story asserting that Pakistani intelligence
officers had handed over to U.S. authorities a Yemeni microbiologist,
Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, who was wanted in connection with the
October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
The report noted that an aircraft bearing tail number N379P, and
parked in a remote area of a little-used terminal at the Karachi
airport, had whisked Mohammed away about 2:40 a.m. Oct. 23. The tail
number was also obtained by The Post's correspondent in Pakistan but
not published.
The News article ricocheted among spy-hunters and Web bloggers as a
curiosity for those interested in divining the mechanics of the new
U.S.-declared war on terrorism.
At 7:54:04 p.m. Oct. 26, the News article was posted on
FreeRepublic.com, which bills itself as "a conservative news forum."
Thirteen minutes later, a chat-room participant posted the plane's
registered owners: Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., of 339
Washington St., Dedham, Mass.
"Sounds like a nice generic name," one blogger wrote in response.
"Kind of like Air America" -- a reference to the CIA's secret
civilian airlines that flew supplies, food and personnel into
Southeast Asia, including Laos, during the Vietnam War.
Eight weeks later, on Dec. 18, 2001, American-accented men wearing
hoods and working with special Swedish security police brought two
Egyptian nationals onto a Gulfstream V that was parked at night at
Stockholm's Bromma Airport, according to Swedish officials and
airport personnel interviewed by Swedish television's "Cold Facts"
program. The account was confirmed independently by The Post. The
plane's tail number: N379P.
Wearing red overalls and bound with handcuffs and leg irons, the men,
who had applied for political asylum in Sweden, were flown to Cairo,
according to Swedish officials and documents. Ahmed Agiza was
convicted by Egypt's Supreme Military Court of terrorism-related
charges; Muhammad Zery was set free. Both say they were tortured
while in Egyptian custody. Sweden has opened an investigation into
the decision to allow them to be rendered.
A month later, in January 2002, a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V landed
at Jakarta's military airport. According to Indonesian officials, the
plane carried away Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian traveling
on a Pakistani passport and suspected of being an al Qaeda operative
who had worked with shoe bomber suspect Richard C. Reid. Without a
hearing, he was flown to Egypt. His status and whereabouts are
unknown. The plane's tail number was not noted, but the CIA is
believed to have only one of the expensive jets.
Over the past year, the Gulfstream V's flights have been tracked by
plane spotters standing at the end of runways with high-powered
binoculars and cameras to record the flights of military and private
aircraft.
These hobbyists list their findings on specialized Web pages.
According to them, since October 2001 the plane has landed in
Islamabad; Karachi; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Tashkent,
Uzbekistan; Baghdad; Kuwait City; Baku, Azerbaijan; and Rabat,
Morocco. It has stopped frequently at Dulles International Airport,
at Jordan's military airport in Amman and at airports in Frankfurt,
Germany; Glasglow, Scotland, and Larnaca, Cyprus.
Premier Executive Transport Services was incorporated in Delaware by
the Prentice-Hall Corporation System Inc. on Jan. 10, 1994. On Jan.
23, 1996, Dean Plakias, a lawyer with Hill & Plakias in Dedham, filed
incorporation papers with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts listing
the company's president as Bryan P. Dyess.
According to public documents, Premier Executive ordered a new
Gulfstream V in 1998. It was delivered in November 1999 with tail
number N581GA, and reregistered for unknown reasons on March 2000
with a new tail number, N379P. It began flights in June 2000, and
changed the tail number again in December 2003.
Plakias did not return several telephone messages seeking comment. He
told the Boston Globe recently that he simply filed the required
paperwork. "I'm not at liberty to discuss the affairs of the client
business, mainly for reasons I don't know," he told the Globe. Asked
whether the company exists, Plakias responded: "Millions of companies
are set up in Massachusetts that are just paper companies."
A lawyer in Washington, whose name is listed on a 1996 IRS form on
record at the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office in Massachusetts
-- and whose name is whited out on some copies of the forms -- hung
up the phone last week when asked about the company.
Three weeks ago, on Dec. 1, the plane, complete with a new tail
number, was transferred to a new owner, Bayard Foreign Marketing of
Portland, Ore., according to FAA records. Its registered agent in
Portland, Scott Caplan, did not return phone calls.
Like the officers at Premier Executive, Bayard's sole listed
corporate officer, Leonard T. Bayard, has no residential or telephone
history. Unlike Premier's officers, Bayard's name does not appear in
any other public records.
Researchers Margot Williams and Julie Tate contributed to this
report. Williams has since left The Washington Post.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
www.washingtonpost.com
[END]
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