Posted on 09/24/2005 12:16:41 PM PDT by Leroy S. Mort
SAN DIEGO (AP) - A branch of the U.S. Navy secretly contracted a 33-plane fleet that included two Gulfstream jets reportedly used to fly terror suspects to countries known to practice torture, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
At least 10 U.S. aviation companies were issued classified contracts in 2001 and 2002 by the obscure Navy Engineering Logistics Office for the ``occasional airlift of USN (Navy) cargo worldwide,'' according to Defense Department documents the AP obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Two of the companies - Richmor Aviation Inc. and Premier Executive Transport Services Inc. - chartered luxury Gulfstreams that flew terror suspects captured in Europe to Egypt, according to U.S. and European media reports. Once there, the men told family members, they were tortured. Authorities in Italy and Sweden have expressed outrage over flights they say were illegal and orchestrated by the U.S. government.
While the Gulfstreams came under scrutiny in 2001, what hasn't been disclosed is the Navy's role in contracting planes involved in operations the CIA terms ``rendition'' and what Italian prosecutors call kidnapping.
``A lot of us have been focusing on the role of the CIA but also suspecting that certain parts of the armed forces are involved,'' said Margaret Satterthwaite, a New York University School of Law researcher who has investigated renditions.
The Navy contracts involve more planes than previously reported - other news outlets totaled 26 planes; the AP identified 33 planes.
Italian judges have issued arrest warrants for 19 purported CIA operatives who allegedly snatched a Muslim cleric from Milan in 2003 and flew him to Cairo, according to FAA records cited by the Chicago Tribune, aboard Richmor's Gulfstream IV. The jet belongs to a part-owner of the Boston Red Sox, who told The Boston Globe that the team's logo was covered when the CIA leased the plane. Another case involves two men taken from Sweden to Egypt in 2001 aboard Premier's Gulfstream V.
Neither the CIA nor a Navy spokeswoman at the Pentagon would comment for this story. Officials at the Navy Engineering Logistics Office, or NELO, in Arlington, Va., didn't respond to messages requesting comment.
Joseph P. Duenas, counsel for the logistics office, declined to provide the contracts, saying they ``involve national security information that is classified.''
The secrecy surrounding the deals makes it unclear why NELO issued them, but one reason may be the office's anonymity - the agency is so buried within the Pentagon bureaucracy that some career Navy officials have never heard of it.
John Hutson, a retired rear admiral who was the Navy's Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000 and is critical of the Bush administration's detainee policies, said he was not familiar with NELO. Told of its activities, Hutson said NELO employees could be held liable if they knew the planes would be used for renditions. Human rights lawyers allege rendition flights violate criminal law.
The office has been around since the mid-1970s, according to a former employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because NELO's activities are secret. NELO operates under different names: it's also known as the Navy's Office of Special Projects and its San Diego location is called the Navy Regional Plant Equipment Office.
None of those names is listed in the U.S. Government Manual, the official compilation of federal departments, agencies and offices. A man who answered the phone at NELO's Arlington office refused to give his name or the agency's address, suggesting it may be classified.
In court documents filed in the case of a fired Office of Special Projects whistleblower, government attorneys described the agency's principal function as ``the conduct of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence activities.''
The AP learned of the airplane contracts through a Freedom of Information Act request that focused on a different subject - permits granted to all 10 aviation companies that let them land at any Navy base worldwide.
The permits list planes operated by the companies and a contract number issued by NELO. The numbers provide some details about the contracts, including when they were issued, but do not say when they expire. In the documents the AP reviewed, contracts were issued in 2001 and 2002 and were cited on landing permits issued in 2004. The NELO contract numbers also appear on permits issued in 2003 and 2004 that allowed seven of the companies to buy fuel at military bases worldwide.
The permits list 31 planes under NELO contract other than the two Gulfstreams. They include a small Cessna; three huge Lockheed Hercules cargo planes; a Gulfstream 1159a; a Lear Jet 35A; a DC-3; two Boeing 737s; and a 53-passenger DeHavilland DH-8 photographed by plane spotters in Afghanistan.
Ownership of the planes is shielded behind a maze of paperwork and elusive executives.
James J. Kershaw is listed as president of three of the companies, located in Massachusetts, Tennessee and North Carolina. Two other companies share the same vice president, Colleen Bornt. Extensive public record searches could not locate either of them.
Record searches also failed to turn up information on Leonard T. Bayard, whose firm bought Premier Executive Transport Services' Gulfstream. The address of Bayard's firm is the Portland, Ore., office of attorney Scott Caplan.
Asked if his client is a real person, Caplan replied: ``No comment.''
Associated Press writer Rukmini Callimachi in Portland, Ore., contributed to this story.
BFD. "There's a war on!"
Go Navy!
VERY good. I agree.
no more people are sent to Gitmo - they get ACLU lawyers there.
I'm no fan of LBJ but if one of the news services had released
this kind of information on his watch, heads would have rolled.
In all due respect, we don't know that it was counterproductive (only the men and women in U.S. Intel know that). And, when it comes to what others think of our torture...I don't remember a whole lot of Muslims crying over the beheading of innocent non-muslim civilians.
Iraqi's angry about panties and the shame of nakedness...frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn.
I think it is criminal to sentence Lyndie England to 11 years for her work at Abu Ghraib.
We are facing the most inhumane enemy in the history of the world (in fact, they have been this inhumane since they enter the history of the world).
Pick up a rifle and join the National Guard, but don't cry to me about our insensitivity to this demonic enemy. The Judeo/Christian west isn't perfect...but we are infinitely more humane than Islamic culture.
Panties and dog leashes, indeed. Nazi Germany would write hilarious comedies about this stupidity on our part.
I agree, this is probably just rough questioning at best. and keeping them in stressful circumstances.
Every piece of information and intel retrieved, pulled or teased from a prisoner of war saves the lives of the enemy as well our side. Go easy on the enemy (they surely will not go easy on us) and this war continues and more damage is done to humans and civilization.
You need to do some research and make some heartfelt decisions about how war is fought.
Islam (Salafi, Wahhabi, devout...etc.) has declared war on the non-Islamic world. They want to rape our women and children, to behead our men of war...and to subjegate, convert, or murder all other civilians.
Our enemy moves slowly and under the radar in many ways...but they will kill you or your children or grandchildren.
Is that the legacy you want to leave?
LBJ was a buffoon.
He carried a sheath of uncovered TS codeword documents in the open for all the prestitutes to photograph.
Cost thousand of man hours to change everything world wide and probably several million $$.
He didn't order his own head to be rolled.
He was a buffoon for sure.
I just meant that he had most of the news organization 'bigs' in his back pocket.
Actually this is an old story, these people where wanted in Saudi Arabia which don’t treat their prisoners very well. They left the important point out that they where Saudi prisoners not ours.
Which commieRAT doesn't? The MSM is after all just the media branch of the commieRAT party.
Buffoon that he was, he wasn't the worst commieRAT President of the last century.
He's number 3 after Slick and Jimmy.
I've listened to enough of the LBJ tapes to believe he held more sway over more news execs and columnists than the other two did. He added new meaning to the term "button holing."
We have not only the right but the duty to use any and all means, as they would use against us to defeat them.
There you go. Good work!
Trajan88; TAMU Class of '88; Plano (Texas) Yankee #23
megatherium:"But Abu Ghraib made a lot of Iraqis angry, and it was counterproductive.
Hmmmm, what doesn't make mooslimbs angry?
Lacking any real gripes, they'll happily manufacture their own excuses or instigate a conflict and then whine about victimhood when they invariably get their a$$es handed back to them on a platter anyway.
As for Abu Ghraib - if I were Daniel Pearl, Ken Bigley, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, any of the captured and Thai or Russian police or military, any of the 1000's of Christians decapitated by in Nigeria or Philippines or a victim of Islamic barbarity in Dafur, Indonesia, or elsewhere - I'd happily appreciate the choice of having panties on my head or my head removed by Koranimals chanting "Allah Akbar!" over and over again while the blood gurgles in whats left of my throat.
You just can't make some folks happy can you, no matter how hard you try, geeze, if I were a terrorist and a muslim (funny how they go so well together) nothing would please me more than to be sent to another muslim country where the culture, the language and the food is familiar and where I don't have to talk, touch or even look at a single filthy kuffar...but I'm not a muslim and neither am I a dangerous Left wing idiot enemy of America like Satterthwaite. I've just had a brilliant idea. Send all the Gitmo trash back to their sandboxes, let their own governments deal with them (hello, Amnesty International?) and use the facility in Cuba for the REAL enemies of the US; the rabid, frothing at the mouth lying scum who enjoy the best the US has to offer whilst doing their best to destroy it.
PS. Accusations of torture are par for the course - OSB wrote that into his instruction book. Maybe we should send this demented woman a copy? Here's the link:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1354196/posts
Good to hear from you both.
I really wonder if the prisoners at Gitmo are really upset by lap dances with female guards...after all, Gitmo is in Dar Al-Harb, not Dar Al-Islam. Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't the rules of conduct different in Dar Al-Harb? Aren't lap dances, OK?
Margaret Satterthwaite
Research Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Clinical Law
Margaret Satterthwaite joined NYU in 2003 after many years in the human rights field. Her human rights career began before law school: between 1990 and 1996, she co-founded and then directed Amnesty International USA's program on the human rights of those persecuted on the basis of their sexual orientation. Satterthwaite also completed a Master's Degree and served as International Programs Coordinator for the human rights education organization Street Law, where she helped develop curriculum in human rights and legal literacy, as well as conducting workshops and training sessions for human rights advocates and legal professionals. In 1995, she was employed as a human rights investigator by the Haitian National Truth and Justice Commission.
After receiving her law degree from NYU in 1999, Satterthwaite clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The following year she was the Furman Fellow at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, where she focused on emergency law and collusion in Northern Ireland . In 2002, Satterthwaite clerked at the International Court of Justice in The Hague . Between 2002 and 2003, Satterthwaite was a human rights consultant for the United Nations, working with the human rights section of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).
Satterthwaite has designed and taught courses on gender, human rights, and humanitarian law at Columbia University and the University of California at Santa Cruz . She has published reports and articles on human rights topics in scholarly and advocacy contexts. Her research interests include methodologies for measuring and monitoring social and economic rights; gender, sexuality and human rights; and the human rights of migrants. She is an active member of the International Human Rights Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York , and is Program Chair of the International Human Rights section of the American Association of Law Schools.
http://www.nyuhr.org/staff.html
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