"US Accused of 'Torture Flights'"

Stephen Grey, London Times

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.