Cross-posted at DailyKos.
It’s time for spring training, Red Sox fans are clamoring to see the World Series Trophy chauffeured around in its own “trophy mobile,” and the other day five members of the Red Sox got makeovers from the “Fab Five” of Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
Last June, while Irish activists held a vigil for imprisoned and indicted anti-war activists who protest the flight of CIA “extraordinary rendition” jets to and from Ireland’s Shannon Airport, the Boston Red Sox chartered an executive jet owned by a Red Sox partner to “help their manager make a quick visit home in the midst of the team’s championship season.”
But, breaking stories — from Knight-Ridder and confirmed today by the Boston Globe — ask “what was the very same Gulfstream – owned by one of the Red Sox’s partners, but presumably without the team’s logo on its fuselage – doing in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003?“
::: more below the fold :::
The Knight-Ridder report in the Kansas City Star tells the part that the Red Sox jet played in the story of the Islamic preacher abducted by U.S. agents, reportedly with the help of chemical spray, off the streets of Milan:
Omar … was imprisoned by the Egyptians and, he claims, brutally tortured. The public prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, who is investigating Omar’s apparent kidnapping, expects to file charges within a few days, according to an Italian official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Spataro made headlines last month when, attempting to identify the plane that transported Omar from Italy to Egypt, he served a warrant on the Italian commander of the air base at Aviano, Italy, which is home to the U.S. Air Force’s 31st Fighter Wing.
Spataro declines to say whether the Gulfstream that landed in Cairo, which bore the tail number N85VM, departed from Aviano around the time of Omar’s disappearance.
The Knight-Ridder reporters accessed copies of “Federal Aviation Administration records obtained by the Chicago Tribune [that] show that Gulfstream N85VM has been many places around the world that the Red Sox have almost certainly never gone.”
The plane’s flight log also shows visits to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.
Egypt, Afghanistan, Jordan and Morocco are among the countries to which the United States is known to have “rendered” terrorism suspects. …
The Knight-Ridder reporters wryly note that the jet’s “itinerary has bordered at times on schizophrenic.”
A week later the Gulfstream was back in Washington, D.C., headed for Shannon, Ireland.
Thanks to “planespotters” — a “worldwide cadre of [apolitical] aviation aficionados” — the Gulfstream has also been “tracked, and sometimes photographed.”
The logo was not visible when the Gulfstream was photographed during a fuel stop in Shannon on June 12, 2004. But when the plane turned up at Denver’s Centennial Airport in February of this year, a photo showed it was sporting not only the Sox logo but a new registration number, N227SV.
Mahlon Richards, a co-owner of Richmor Aviation in Hudson, N.Y., and the Gulfstream’s charter agent, confirmed that N85VM and N227SV, which share the same manufacturer’s serial number, 1172, were in fact the same aircraft.
According to FAA records, the Gulfstream’s owner is not Richmor but Assembly Point Aviation, a company with an address in Albany, N.Y., but no telephone number. Dun & Bradstreet describes Assembly Point as a “religious organization” that is somehow involved with “churches, temples and shrines.”
Although the Red Sox office wouldn’t return Knight-Ridder’s calls, the Boston Globe got confirmation:
It’s chartered a lot,” Morse [who made his fortune developing cardiac catheters] said by phone from his winter home in Jupiter, Fla. ”It just so happens one of our customers is the CIA.
”I was glad to have the business, actually. I hope it was all for a real good purpose.” …
But Morse said he was ”stunned” by a published report suggesting that the plane might have been used for special renditions. …
“I don’t know how you would confirm it,” Morse said. ”To me, it’s stunning that they would link that stuff together. I called [Red Sox CEO] Larry [Lucchino] to let him know. I didn’t want him to get broadsided. I’m a little bit embarrassed the Red Sox are linked to this, for no reason whatsoever.”
Your tax dollars are hard at work:
Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the trial of five peace activists in Dublin, which began on March 7, was declared a mistrial, and the five will be retried in October 2005.
Ciaron O’Reilly, Deirdre Clancy, Damien Moran, Karen Fallon and Nuin Dunlop – were arrested on February 3rd of 2003. They were arrested and face charges stemming from an action at Shannon Airport in Clare County. Shannon airport is a civilian airport that has been transformed into a pit stop for the U.S military. An average of 13,000 U.S. troops stop at Shannon Airport each month. On February 3rd – the activists – known as the “Pit Stop Ploughshares” – broke into a hangar at the airport, and damaged a US Navy war plane that was on its way to Iraq. They built a shrine with rosary and Islamic beads, a Koran a bible and photographs of Iraqi children. The activists face maximum sentences of up to 10 years imprisonment. (Democracy Now!, March 7, 2005)
The five, you’ll be glad to know, have received a presidential pardon from “West Wing” president Martin Sheen.
(NOTE: CLICK photo to see an enlargement of Martin Sheen with the Irish activists.)
Follow the trial and protests of the Pitstop Ploughshares.
masshol says this is a setup by steinbrenner.
And on a more serious note, to be fair Susan, can you please rename this post to be less sensationalist? It’s not the Red Sox jet. At all.
Changed…. and thanks for speaking up!
as Booman knows too well, I am the worst headline writer in the world. He has carte blanche to change this however he wishes.
and thank you.
Oh, so we’re a little sensitive about this? I can dig that. (I’m marking time until Thurs. night when the Univ of Wash men play in the Sweet 16.)
Maybe it’s considered a perk for dubya’s fundraising “pioneers”.
It’s not the only one.
Plane spotting.
Don’t look for tail number N379P if you are seeking a clandestine transporter of enemy combatants to undisclosed locations for Extraordinary Rendition, i.e., delivery of detainees to foreign locations for advanced interrogation. A straightforward open source analysis reveals that N379P is now N8068V, same serial number (581), same owner (Premiere Executive Transport Services Inc.), and one might surmise, the same purpose, (And when someone awakes to the public recognition of this datum, expect it to change again, or change ownership, or contract provider, and possibly the aircraft.)
As long as an airframe remains under US registration, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Registration Inquiry offers ten useful searches for N-number, Name, Engine, Document Index, Serial Number, Make/Model, Dealer, State & County, Territory & Country, and N-number Availability. For Canada it is Transport Canada’s Civil Aircraft Register, for the UK it is the Civil Aviation Authority’s G-INFO Database Search. Some nations are not so accurate in their record keeping….
http://spaces.icgpartners.com/index2.asp?NGuid=53D0DFB7D3B64B39BE2316DFCB79707E
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….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27826-2004Dec26.html?sub=AR
http://www.liquidlist.com/archives/2004/11/war_torture_air.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1357699,00.html
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2004/may/12sweden.htm
http://www.planepictures.net/netsearch4.cgi?srch=N379P&srng=2&stype=reg
http://www.planepictures.net/netshow.php?id=34499
Interesting that most people here and on dKos jump on the Red Sox aspect. For me as an European it is much more scary that the CIA comes to Europe and kidnaps people from the street or from a bus, and then flies them to other countries for torturing. I don’t care who’s plane it is, I care about the kidnapping.
No shit. I’m kind of blowing a fuse … i’m about to add an addendum to the diary so people GET IT.
I blew a bitty fuse, and I quoted your post here — but didn’t use your name — trust it is alright because you kind of said it all.
My rant is at the end of the diary, udpated.
That’s fine with me. Interesting the different perceptions people have on the same story. Good diary, by the way.
If people are jumping on the Red Sox angle, that’s telling. Having America’s pastime associated with torture could help the more important aspects of the story gain visibility. So if it takes the Red Sox to give the story legs, I’m all for it.
given the results of last years playoffs, I already associate the Red Sox with torture </snark>.
boo, man. </cheesy puns>
(inspired by none other than the Dude himself. That’s right, Dude, they peed on YOUR fucking rug.
this aggression, this unchecked Fenway aggression will not stand, man.
Across…this..line…you..do…not…
Also, dude, Chinaman is not the correct nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
This is not about Vietnam, dude.
I so want to go to Lebowski Fest. Those guys are brilliant, if I understand them correctly.
count me in.
but let me tell you something, pandejo, you pull any of that crazy shit with me, you flash you your piece out the lanes, I’ll take it away from you and stick it up your ass and pull the fuckin trigger til it goes ‘click’.
I honestly can’t think of a movie, beside Human Traffic (heading over to movies and books diary soon) that I would rather watch any night of the week. If there are any Lebowski Fest events in the DC Metro area that anyone is going to, please let me know.
Welcome to the Hotel California.
Sometimes I get so angry at the state of American politics that I must go out to dinner with my friends. Or I see a movie with my girlfriend. Sometimes I even get drunk with the boys at bars that I’m sure will have a seat for me. And sometimes I think topics on a blog are very serious like when the executive branch circumvents the Constitution to torture people, as here. So, tsk-tsk. This is your symbolic rebuke in a forum that embraces your very freedom to drop the linguistic ball. If we’re talking about innocents potentially being tortured to death, we can talk about the antics Jeff Bridges and John Goodman in another thread. Flame away.
I didn’t even realize we were cluttering the CIA rendering thread. My apologies.
You’re a gracious host, and I’m being PC-nit-picky. I know the people here care. I’m probably just in one of those “There’s no way Bush was elected to a second term” moments. When I’m denying that reality, I’m likely also denying everyone else’s things, even when “things” means having a good time. In short, I’m frustrated at the state of the world, not you guys.
I’m heading back to the rat-hole.
Rebuke accepted here as well. it was late. i got carried away with lebowski, not realizing what thread I was on. point taken.
even if their not, who cares. Seeing as how this has come up on another thread, it looks like someone should start some sort of ‘The Bowling Alley is Open’ diary. Where fans can pop in and out when to much heavy stuff here is getting them down. Trade quotes/insults and such.
I admit I probably would not have paid half as much attention to this diary if it hadn’t had Red Sox in the title(and I’m no baseball fan).
I’ve been avoiding stories about rendition but now I’m pulled in(also went to your crosspost and read comments there) and hope you keep us aprized of this whole sorry mess.
Thank god for those women in Ireland..if we tried that here we’d probably be whisked away on one of these very planes never to be heard from again. Although that just shows again I guess that the rest of the world is more aware of what our country’s doing in regards to Iraq/terrorism and clandestine affairs by our CIA than most people in this country.
The CIA zipping around the world grabbing people off the streets in other countries is such bad news in so many ways and will come back to haunt us. Something will go wrong very publically sooner or later with the CIA playing their ‘save the world mindset’ and all hell will break loose against us.
This probably won’t surprise some of you, but years and years ago I was an information systems analyst, working in an office buried deep within a huge public university in the United States.
I remember reading Render magazine there, the glossy standard of the rendering industry. While usually “rendering” involves the processing of animal parts (including offal) not used for food (human or animal) into products such as protein meal and grease, they also do something else.
They also process what are called “downers”, animals which have died before arriving at the slaughterhouse as well as animals who die at the farm, through sickness, old age, flood or other reasons.
Every time I hear the word “rendering” I think of this, the processing of the stinking dead parts of a creature. And somehow the two terms, the CIA rendering and animal rendering, merge together in my mind… sending these people to jails where they can be beaten, flayed, electrocuted and mutilated. If grease and protein meal is the product of animal rendering, what is the product of CIA rendering?
By the way, it was at that same job that I read my first copy of The Spotlight. Remember friends, this was BEFORE the internet even existed, at least for us non-DARPA mortals 🙂
Pax