Iraq: America's SS flies in Gulfstreams and makes people disappear
Reader tip Read about the Koran desecration/abuse at Guantanamo memos.
Intruduction
This blog entry outlines the Rendition program. This is a program that moves personnel from Iraq to countries that use torture.
This note outlines the spotted aicraft in the Rendition program, discusses Michael Isikoffs findings about the rendition program, and goes into some discussion on the fuel support required.
It is hoped that this note will show that the operations is well planned, robust, and well organized. It is not an isolated program, but requires many coordinating military commands and extensive logistical support in terms of fuel, transportatation and supplies.
More broadly, it is hoped that this note shed light on how military hardware like Gulfstreams can be used for conduct that violates international law. These are not simply "secret" opreations not to be discussed, but matters of criminal law.
The United States has a rich history of fighting for freed. It's Declaration of Indepdence and Constitution are built on the idea that free people can choose their own way. These documents are largely in response to the abuses suffered under the British Monarchy.
Arguably, the United States is no different than the British Monarchy. It inflicts terror on its population, ignores the law of the land, and essetnailly engages in the same sort of conduct outlined in the Declaration of Indepdence.
It is curious to contrast the goals of America in Iraq vs what America is actually doing both at home and abroad.
Democracy succeeds in the United States when the rule of law is respected. When the government strays from the rule of law, the harm outweighs the benefit. House Government Reform Committee Ref
It is likely the CIA and FBI in Iraq have read and ignored the above quote. It's all well and good to torture and kill innocent Iraqis. Wonder why the world doesn't care about the United States? Read more.
CIA Express: Rendition program
Seymour Hersh identified a massive effort underway to make people disappear. To support this "massive disappearing project," the CIA uses Gulfstreams to transport the personnel out on the CIA-express.
We estimate that 190 fuel truck convoys carrying $25M worth of fuel were required to support the CIA airline which continues to fly personnel into Diego Garcia. These people were also transferred to other locations.
Hersch Article
Seymour Hersch wrote about the CIA express. His article prompted spotters worldwid to search for the specific aircraft involved, numbers, and who owns the company.
Hersh Article excerpt. Fredrik Laurin is mentioned here.
The story talks about Ireland. Also here in Ireland.
2005 Media
CBS 60 Minutes did a review of the Rendition program, tracing how one man was taken from Kosovo [?], had his clothes removed with scissors, and how he was taken to Afghanistan. Then, many weeks later he was released. He made his way back to Lebanon to explain his mysterious disappearance to his wife and 7-year old [?] son.
There are other descriptions of the rendition program here.
Also, if you recall the Lodi overflights; well, there was some discussion of how the CIA charters companies in and out of DC-area from North Carolina using companies with PO Boxes: Aero Contractors Ltd. from Johnston County Airport. [Here are the public versions of that article.]
Example: Web search of the alleged aircraft
Search by TV network of the aircraft. Another request looking for over-land stops on the West Side of the Red Sea: Djakarta (Halim airport) Karachi and Cairo (HECA) ref.
This is a jammed site: Ref: Notice of aircraft suspected of being involved in CIA-supported kidnappings and murders. Looks like this was a private contract aircraft, so it's actual use today could very well be legitimate, unrelated. No way to know either way.
Aircraft spotter results:
Another N8068V image: link to a copyrighted image by Jean Luc ALTHERR
Notice the number of windows [six, 6]; upper-tail markings [horizontal lines], and antenna on the top of the fuselage [three, 3] all match in both photos.
Premiere Executive, according to 60 Minutes, has an address that matches a law firm in Massachusettes.
Here is the trace on the aircraft tail numbers: N44982 (formerly N8068V, N379P and originally N581GA)
Address
Here is the trace on N379P.
*Name: PREMIERE EXECUTIVE TRANSPORT SERVICES INC
*Street 339 WASHINGTON ST STE 202
*City: DEDHAM State MASSACHUSETTS
*Zip Code: 02026-1815
*County: NORFOLK
*Country: UNITED STATES
Alleged CIA Contractor Company
The contract company using this aircraft flies out of North Carolina, can be used to move special forces units in and out of Ft. Bragg, and can fly in and out of DC area for assistance to Lanley.
Here are the details on the North Carolina companies:
US companies that often flies/operate the aircraft:
Aero Contractor Ltd
Johnson County Airport
Smithfield, North Carolina, USA
STEVENS EXPRESS LEASING, INC.
8130 COUNTRY VILLAGE, DRIVE S101,
CORDOVA, Tennesee, USA
Discussion
Hersh's comments in California are quite revealing. They come after several months of PR-related to his new book. Clearly he's got contacts inside the Pentagon.
The news is, Iraq is just like Vietnam: We're going to lose it, the estimates are well under requirements, and the real objective of the PR stuff is to get the President re-elected and protect the pet budget programs: Tax relief for their friends, and more abuse of those they're going to draft in 2005.
No difference between Bush and Johnson, according to Hersch:
My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret documentÂ…There's a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don't carry American passports, and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn't know what to do Â…
Spotter records.
Did the FBI raids into Indymedia have anything to do with shutting down discussion about the Gulfstream traffic?
the plane used to fly Zery and Agiza ,a chartered Gulfstream jet ,was tracked by a Swedish reporter Fredrik Lauren . Ireland was one of its stop off points. Another was Guantanamo.Ref
DoD has 13 GulfStream IIIs
According to Chalmers Johnson, in his new book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, the Defense Department maintains a fleet of 71 Lear jets, 13 Gulfstream IIIs and 17 Cessna Citation luxury jets. Ref
Pictures
Gulstream One; Two; Three and Four; Five.
Problem
The GulfStreams are for executive-VIP travel, meaning that any questions or monitoring of these aircraft can bring a nasty response.
Translation: If you're going to track the "bad guys in the CIA who are doing this stuff," you're going to have to do it without the VIP-security personnel knowing about it.
In other words, the FBI's "notice of security alerts" are the very orders used not to fight terrorism, but to dissuade and intimidate people who are trying to uncover evidence of war crimes, and dissuade public oversight of the unlawful conduct of military personnel in Iraq and worldwide. They're using secrecy and innuendo about bogus evidence to justify "heightened alerts."
The VIPs need to know: They are being used as cover, and the "security alerts" are sometimes bogus distractions to shift attention from the war crimes to "the protected person," so as to then justify bringing in the highly-armed protection services against the spotter.
CIA knows the VIP transport is excellent cover; anytime they run into a problem they'll simply file a bogus claim of "security alert" to shift the attention from the CIA-war-crimes onto those who dare point out the problem.
This is a classic case of "incompetent government personnel engaging in misconduct" using their position to shift attention onto those who dare point out the problem. They will lie to anyone to avoid allegations of war crimes, getting anyone to explain themselves, all the while knowing that their misconduct is the real problem.
Numbers of disappeared
Total numbers range in the 25,000.
Guantanamo Bay, Diego Garcia, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. According to current estimates, the US is incarcerating over 25,000 detainees in these hellholes, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Let's assume they move 10, on average, from Iraq to Diego Garcia. That's 2,500 flights, or 5,000 round-trips. Let's assume 28,300pounds of fuel per flight, required at both the take-off and landing points. That's 141 Million pounds of fuel.
Just to make people disappear, half by truck into Baghdad, which would explain the heavy convoys and attacks on those fuel convoys. 70 million pounds of fuel converts to gallons:
Specific gravity of Jet Fuel ranges from .62 to .88; multiplying that by the conversion factor of 8.34, yields an approximate weight per gallon of Jet Fuel from 5.2 [0.193 gallons per pound]to 7.3 pounds per gallon [0.136 gallons per pound].
70M pounds of fuel would be 9.5 Million gallons, or $25M, using Haliburton's rate of 2.64/gallon.
4,000 gallons in one tank.
That equates to 2,384 trucks; assuming 20 trucks per convoy, that is 119 convoys just to have fuel to make people disappear.
They get paid $80,000/year.
- Depends on the total number of trucks they have in Iraq.
- Depends on the distance from the start point to Baghdad. It's 300 miles from Kuwait City to Baghdad.
The speed has been reported as paced by the Humvee, 60 mph, or 5 hours minimum.
Total fuel consumption is __________.
Which means the CIA-cut of the fuel is __________.
10 hour round trip to the compounds.
Problem: Gulfstream III has a range of only 3,072 which his just above the 2,900 nautical mile limit. They don't have enough fuel to maintain safety margins in a headwind, indicating that they have a transshipment point if moving prisoners from anywhere north of Baghdad. However, if there are fields south of Baghdad, then a direct flight to Diego Garcia is possible.
CIA does not use USAF aircraft, but their own private fleet.
In other words, assuming a one-way trip from Diego Garcia without any transshipment point, you can get an idea of where the CIA uploads their aircraft in the middle of Iraq. It's well-south of Baghdad, which would explain the heavy fighting in the south of the country -- US forces need to protect these airports; and the Iraqis are fighting to intercept the body-train. The US gets hit with about 90-attacks per day, and this number is rising.
The problem is: The only way the CIA can run this operation "outside DoD" is if they're using non-DoD security forces, which add another layer of mystery: Who these people really are. They had plenty of people volunteering to support the Abu Ghraib-torture operations, courtesy of the poorly-disciplined state-level officers who now want to be cowboys in Iraq for alot of money.
Thus, this would explain why the Iraqis are going after contractors: There's no other way to hit the personnel who are engaging in this pipeline. CIA doesn't respond to public pressure, and the "official forces" under DoD aren't told, "We've got another GulfStream we need to load up."
Private airlines with private airports?
Haliburton is a contractor, and all the fuel is mixed, there's no way to know "which of the money from DoD is actually going directly to the CIA Gulfstreams; the Question becomes if the CIA is actually running these operations "outside the Air Force" then it would mean that the CIA and the USAF would have to be interchangeable for purposes of fueling -- meaning that they don't have their own fuel-trucks for their own airports...or do they?
How would the CIA get a fuel-allocation from a non-CIA source? The whole purpose of having the "CIA jets" is to ensure that there is no trace to the USAF. So it doesn't make sense that CIA would show up say, "I'm an air force jet, I want fuel." It would stand to reason that they'd have their own airport/fueling system.
So, there's a place where they've been brining in these trucks, all 190-convoys worth to support these Gulf Streams. No wonder they're shooting at the media and locals -- to get them to be quiet about the Gulf Streams flying in and out of these remote locations.
In other words, because the US goverment failed prior to 9-11, there's an increasing circle of "people who have to say nothing" in order for the President to "go after ghosts." They've been targeting people like Sibel, then Dan Convertino, and now people in Iraq to keep quiet.
What does it feel like to work in DoJ and the CIA know you're killing off innocent people just to cover-up war crimes?
All those witnesses, disappearing. It's obvious they're doing it for their own paycheck and some other warped sense of reality -- they certainly aren't' doing it for the constitution or freedom. In fact, it has more to do with covering up the scale of the misconduct, bad planning.
The problem is: Their reasoning is faulty: We already know about the cover-up, the 20,000-some-odd people that have been shipped out; and we already know about the secret airlines.
How many more people are they planning to kill to "protect a secret" that everyone already knows about? At this point, they're simply killing more people just for the sake of killing people -- which is at the heart of why the insurgency is growing -- the Iraqis know this has absolutely no purpose related to anything related to anything logical.
Moreover, when the Iraqis realize that the US-actions are unrelated to reason-logic-rationality, why should the Iraqis do anything in exchange; nor why would anyone believe that a US-promise will be believed?
Here's a hint: It's not illegal to talk about illegal activities; but it is illegal to kill people for simply defending the constitution. That's what the CIA is doing in Iraq; they're turning on themselves and taking out those who dare to take their oath of office, constitution, and the Geneva Convention seriously.
Other links, Updates
Center for Constitutional Rights David Cole on Democracy Now in the case of Maher Arar.
Cole emphasized that the Canadian and Syran government actions are not consistent with US allegations that Maher is an "alleged AlQueda member."
It makes no sense to believe Maher is with AlQueda while two governments let him go free. The US simply made allegations.
It remains unclear how many other lawsuits are filed; or what efforts are underway to suppress information.
Sibel Edmonds confirms that alot of information is suppressed under the guise of "national security," when the real reason is to avoid consequences for misconduct, inaction, and violations of the law.
posted by Constant @ 6:22 PM
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