[News] US accused of torture flights

[News at freedomarchives.org]

November 14, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
US accused of ‘torture flights’
Stephen Grey
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AN executive jet is being used by the American intelligence agencies to fly 
terrorist suspects to countries that routinely use torture in their prisons.

The movements of the Gulfstream 5 leased by agents from the United States 
defence department and the CIA are detailed in confidential logs obtained 
by The Sunday Times which cover more than 300 flights.

Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have 
delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the 
files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is 
using such regimes to carry out “torture by proxy” ­ a charge denied by the 
American government.

Some of the information from the suspects is said to have been used by MI5 
and MI6, the British intelligence services. The admissibility in court of 
evidence gained under torture is being considered in the House of Lords in 
an appeal by foreign-born prisoners at Belmarsh jail, south London, against 
their detention without trial on suspicion of terrorism.

Over the past two years the unmarked Gulfstream has visited British 
airports on many occasions, although it is not believed to have been 
carrying suspects at the time.

The Gulfstream and a similarly anonymous-looking Boeing 737 are hired by 
American agents from Premier Executive Transport Services, a private 
company in Massachusetts.

The white 737, registration number N313P, has 32 seats.

It is a frequent visitor to American military bases, although its exact 
role has not been revealed.

More is known about the Gulfstream, which has the registration number N379P 
and can carry 14 passengers. Movements detailed in the logs can be matched 
with several sightings of the Gulfstream at airports when terrorist 
suspects have been bundled away by US counterterrorist agents.

Analysis of the plane’s flight plans, covering more than two years, shows 
that it always departs from Washington DC. It has flown to 49 destinations 
outside America, including the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and other 
US military bases, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, 
Libya and Uzbekistan.

Witnesses have claimed that the suspects are frequently bound, gagged and 
sedated before being put on board the planes, which do not have special 
facilities for prisoners but are kitted out with tables for meetings and 
screens for presentations and in-flight films.

The US plane is not used just for carrying prisoners but also appears to be 
at the disposal of defence and intelligence officials on assignments from 
Washington.

Its prisoner transfer missions were first reported in May by the Swedish 
television programme Cold Facts. It described how American agents had 
arrived in Stockholm in the Gulfstream in December 2001 to take two 
suspected terrorists from Sweden to Egypt.

At the time of what was presented as an “extradition” to Egypt, Swedish 
ministers made no public mention of American involvement in the detention 
of Ahmed Agiza, 42, and Muhammed Zery, 35, who was later cleared.

Witnesses described seeing the prisoners handed to US agents whose faces 
were masked by hoods. The clothes of the handcuffed prisoners were cut off 
and they were dressed in nappies covered by orange overalls before being 
forcibly given sedatives by suppository.

The Gulfstream flew them to Egypt, where both prisoners claimed they were 
beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. Despite liberal 
Swedish laws on freedom of information, diplomatic telegrams on the case 
released to the media were edited to conceal the complaints of torture.

Hamida Shalaby, Agiza’s mother, said: “The mattress had electricity . . . 
When they connected to the electricity, his body would rise up and then 
fall down and this up and down would go on until they unplugged electricity.”

A month before the Swedish extradition, the same Gulfstream was identified 
by Masood Anwar, a Pakistani newspaper reporter in Karachi. Airport staff 
told Anwar they had seen Jamil Gasim, a Yemeni student who was suspected of 
links to Al-Qaeda, being bundled aboard the jet by a group of white men 
wearing masks. The jet took Gasim to Jordan, since when he has disappeared.

“The entire operation was so mysterious that all persons involved in the 
operation, including US troops, were wearing masks,” a source at the 
airport told Anwar.

On another mission, in January 2002, a Gulfstream was seen at Jakarta 
airport to deport Muhammad Saad Iqbal, 24, an Al-Qaeda suspect who was said 
by US officials to be an acquaintance of Richard Reid, the British 
“shoe-bomber” jailed in America for trying to blow up a flight from Paris 
to Miami.

An Indonesian official told an American newspaper that Iqbal was “hustled 
aboard an unmarked, US-registered Gulfstream . . . and flown to Egypt”, 
where almost nothing has been heard of him since.

The CIA Gulfstream’s flight logs show it flew from Washington to Cairo, 
where it picked up Egyptian security agents, before apparently going on to 
Jakarta to take Iqbal to Egypt.

Another transfer involved a British citizen. On November 8, 2002, the 
Gulfstream took off for Banjul in Gambia. On the same day Wahab Al-Rawi, a 
38-year-old Briton, was among four people arrested at the airport by local 
secret police and handed over to interrogators who said they were “from the 
US embassy”.

Wahab said he had previously been questioned by MI5 because his brother 
Basher, an Iraqi national, was an acquaintance of Abu Qatada, the radical 
London-based cleric.

When Wahab asked the CIA agents for access to the British consul, as 
required under the Vienna convention signed by America, the agents are said 
to have laughed. “Why do you think you’re here?” one agent said to Wahab. 
“It’s your government that tipped us off in the first place.” Wahab was 
later released but Basher was sent to Guantanamo and remains there and has 
yet to be accused of any specific crime.

Some former CIA operatives and human rights campaigners claim the agency 
and the Pentagon use a process called “rendition” to send suspects to 
countries such as Egypt and Jordan. They are then tortured largely to gain 
information for the Americans who, it is alleged, encourage these countries 
to use aggressive interrogation methods banned under US law.

Bob Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East, said: “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 . . . you 
send them to Egypt.”

Among the countries where prisoners have been sent by America is 
Uzbekistan, a close ally and a dictatorship whose secret police are 
notorious for their interrogation methods, including the alleged boiling of 
prisoners. The Gulfstream made at least seven trips to the Uzbek capital.

The details bolster claims by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador, 
that America has sent terrorist suspects from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan to 
be interrogated by torture.

In a memo, whose disclosure last month contributed to Murray’s removal, he 
told Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, that the CIA station chief in 
Tashkent had “readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining 
intelligence”.

The CIA and Premier declined to discuss the allegations over the planes. 
The American government, however, denies it is in any way complicit in 
torture and says it is actively working to stamp out the practice.
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