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Plane used by government owned by massachusetts company { November 29 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=56373http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=56373
Plane allegedly used by government owned by Mass. company
By Associated Press
Monday, November 29, 2004
DEDHAM, Mass. - A private jet allegedly leased by the U.S. government to skirt extradition protocol by secretly ferrying suspected terrorists around the globe is registered to a Massachusetts company.
Human rights groups say the Gulfstream jet is well known around the world, but virtually invisible to the American public. They claim the U.S. government uses it for ``extraordinary'' renditions - the secret practice of handing off prisoners in U.S. custody to foreign governments that use torture in interrogations.
The 20-seat jet is registered to a company called Premier Executive Transport Services, with a legal address in Dedham, a Boston suburb.
The jet was used in 2001 to secretly transfer two Al Qaeda suspects from Sweden to Egypt, where one suspect's lawyer says his client was tortured.
The Boston Globe reported that Premier Executive Transport Services appears to be a just a paper company.
``I'm not at liberty to discuss the affairs of the client business, mainly for reasons I don't know,'' said attorney Dean Plakias, whose law firm, Hill & Plakias, is Premier's local representative.
When asked if the company exists, he said: ``Millions of companies are set up in Massachusetts that are just paper companies.''
``Extraordinary'' renditions can be authorized only by a presidential directive, and have been used in the war on terror, the Globe said.
Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission in March that the practice was a major part of the plan to combat Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and that at least 70 renditions took place before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The practice has outraged human rights activists, who called it ``outsourcing'' torture.
``People are more or less openly admitting that there are certain practices that we would rather not do in the U.S., so why not let our allies do it?'' Ray McGovern, a former CIA operations officer who is often critical of tactics used in the war on terror, told the Globe in an interview published Monday.
The jet has been sighted around the world, and although it is a civil aircraft, it has a permit to land at U.S. military bases worldwide, according to the U.S. Army Aeronautical Services Agency.
The owners of Premier also are obscure. The only address the Globe could find for the man listed as the president of the company was a post office box about seven miles from the Pentagon.
The Sunday Times of London recently reported that it obtained a classified flight log of the plane that showed 300 flights from Washington, D.C., to 49 nations, including Libya, Jordan, and Uzbekistan - three countries where the State Department has reported the use of torture.
Sightings of the plane have been published in newspapers and on the Internet across the globe.
In October 2001, the Pakistani newspaper The News International reported that the jet - citing its Massachusetts-based registration number - landed at the Karachi airport at 1 a.m. one day to pick up Al Qaeda suspect believed to be Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammad, a Yemeni university student.
Two months later, the jet transported two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed Al-Zery, from Stockholm to Egypt, according to a Sweden's Justice Department and news reports. Zery's lawyer, Kjell Jonsson, claims his client was ``interrogated under violence ... it's no secret.'' He said Zery was accused of being a terrorist linked to Al Qaeda, but was freed after two years in custody, and never charged. Agiza was sentenced by a military court to 25 years in prison for being a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
U.S. Rep. Edward D. Markey, a Malden Democrat who has fought to outlaw extraordinary renditions, said he was angry to hear about the Bay State connection.
``I am appalled and saddened to learn that a company linked to Massachusetts appears to be aiding and abetting the transport of prisoners to foreign nations where they are likely to face torture in violation of the Geneva Convention,'' he said.
( © Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. )
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