On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 09:41:39 -0500, "Gig 601XL Builder"
wr.giacona@coxDOTnet wrote in taQ2f.24725$b65.22709@okepread01::

Kyrgyzstan

Isn't that the destination for secret CIA flights full of POWs
destined for torture?

http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchi...ves/001548.php
CIA Expanding Terror Battle under Guise of Charter Flights
By Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams
The New York Times

Tuesday 31 May 2005

Smithfield, NC - The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from
Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and
fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy
Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the
fact that Aero's pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle
against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad,
Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.

When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member
of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another
country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency
experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized
prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles
Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.

Aero Contractors' planes dropped C.I.A. paramilitary officers into
Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi, Pakistan,
right after the United States Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and
flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day before an
American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence
agents last year, according to flight data and other records.

While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with
pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in
fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret
air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A.
officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air
company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to
former employees.

Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies
and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on
paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001
as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.

An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and
corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers
and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them
purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a
web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and
no function apart from owning the aircraft.

The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated
by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero
Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper
Aviation.

The civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be
welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting
requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other
governments. But the cover can fail, as when two Austrian fighter jets
were scrambled on Jan. 21, 2003, to intercept a C.I.A. Hercules
transport plane, equipped with military communications, on its way
from Germany to Azerbaijan.

"When the C.I.A. is given a task, it's usually because national policy
makers don't want 'U.S. government' written all over it," said Jim
Glerum, a retired C.I.A. officer who spent 18 years with the agency's
Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If
you're flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty
of executive jets, you can look like any other company."

Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out renditions,
the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects
in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another,
including countries that routinely engage in torture. The resulting
controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency's flights in the
last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists
in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements.

....