On Aug. 12, 2003, a Gulfstream IV aircraft carrying six passengers took off from Dulles International Airport and flew to Bangkok with fueling stops in Cold Bay, Alaska, and Osaka, Japan.
Before it returned four days later, the plane also touched down in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates and Ireland. As these unusual flights happened, U.S. officials took custody of an Indonesian terrorist, Riduan Isamuddin, who had been captured in Thailand and would spend the next three years being shuttled among secret prisons operated by the CIA.
Ah, yes! Let's not forget the Eight Glorious Years of Bush-Cheney's banana republic too quickly. We were given a taste, then, of what life in an Argentinian dictatorship must have been like when people were "disappeared" without explanation.
Obama, soon after he moved into the White House, had the good sense to end secret rendition flights. These covert operations, which took prisoners to secret black holes in Eastern Europe and into other dictatorships where they could be tortured, were illegal and shameful. It was a dirty business. Obama abolished it. A Bush era "homeland security" policy of endless bureacratic secrecy still stands in the way of getting details about those rendition flights.
Many of these flights were contracted with small, private contractors. Evidence from those flights is gradually coming to light as those contractors have public disputes in courts around the country. Details are leaking out through business records.
The Gulfstream IV’s itinerary, as well as the $339,228.05 price tag for the journey, are among the details of shadowy CIA flights that have emerged in a small Upstate New York courthouse in a billing dispute between contractors. The court documents offer a rare glimpse of the costs and operations of the controversial rendition program.
For all the secrecy that once surrounded the CIA program, a significant part of its operation was entrusted to very small aviation companies whose previous experience involved flying sports teams across the country.
So if there's still so much secrecy about the renditions program, how come we're finally learning about it? Who's investigating?
The more than 1,500 pages from the trial and appeals court files appear to include sensitive material, such as logs of air-to-ground phone calls made from the plane. These logs show multiple calls to CIA headquarters; to the cell- and home phones of a senior CIA official involved in the rendition program; and to a government contractor, Falls Church-based DynCorp, that worked for the CIA.
Attorneys for a London-based legal charity, Reprieve, which has been investigating the CIA program, discovered the Columbia County case and brought the court records to the attention of The Washington Post, the Associated Press and a British newspaper, the Guardian. ...WaPo
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New Wikileaks revelations suggest that U.S. forces executed a number of women and children in Tikrit, Iraq in 2006 and then used an airstrike to cover up the evidence of the killings. Phillip Alston, U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, apparently had tried to probe the killings but got no response from the United States, which “was the case with most of the letters to the U.S. in the 2006-2007 period.”
If we were still an honorable country, Wikileaks wouldn't have to do our job for us.
