Records show Diego Garcia link to alleged torture flights (Guardian)

Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday January 4, 2007
The Guardian

A CIA jet flew at least twice to Poland from Kabul in Afghanistan, where the US detained numerous terrorist suspects, new details about aircraft involved in "torture flights" show.

The journeys of the aircraft, a Gulfstream registered N379P, are disclosed in a list of more than 3,000 flight logs obtained by Stephen Grey, an investigative journalist and author of Ghost Plane. The same aircraft flew from Washington via Athens to the British Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia, the logs show. It is the first time that the British-owned territory, where the US has a large airbase, has been linked to the controversial CIA flights. Though there have been persistent reports in the US that detainees have been secretly held in Diego Garcia, the British government has always dismissed the claims ...

The logs show that the Gulfstream, previously identified as being used by the CIA, flew from Afghanistan in June and July 2003. Later that year, the same aircraft flew from Amman, the Jordanian capital, to Kabul.

The flight plans, which have been obtained from official sources, reveal the extent of the CIA's flights, many of which - including the Gulfstream - have passed through Britain. Many have been used for secretly transporting terrorist suspects to places where they risked being tortured ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1982192,00.html

This is so despicable.

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Mamdouh Habib, 49, an Australian citizen, was caught up in the rendition system after being arrested near the Pakistani-Afghan border shortly after the 9/11 attacks. His lawyers say he was bundled aboard a small jet by men speaking English with American accents and flown to Egypt, the country where he was born. For the next six months, they say, he was held in a Cairo jail, where he was hung from hooks, beaten, given shocks from an electric cattle prod, and told he was to be raped by dogs.

Habib also says that he was shackled and forced into three torture chambers: one filled with water up to his chin, requiring him to stand on tiptoe for hours, a second with a low ceiling and two feet of water, forcing him into a painful stoop, and a third with a few inches of water, and within sight of an electric generator which his captors said would be used to electrocute him. He made statements - which he has since withdrawn - declaring that he had helped train the 9/11 attackers in martial arts. Habib was moved to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo. Last January he was released without charge and allowed to return to his wife and three children in Sydney.

Maher Arar, 34, a Canadian citizen, was seized in September 2002 while travelling through JFK airport in New York, on his way home after a holiday in Tunisia. After being questioned for 13 days about a terrorism suspect - the brother of a work colleague - he was handcuffed, placed in leg irons, and put aboard an executive jet. Hearing the crew describe themselves as members of the "special removals unit", and discovering he was bound for Syria, the country where he was born, he begged them to return to the US. The crew, he says, ignored his pleas and suggested he watch a spy film that was being shown on board. After landing in Jordan, Arar says he was driven to Syria, where he was held in a small underground cell which he likened to a grave. His hands were repeatedly whipped with cables, he says. He added that he would eventually confess to anything put to him. Arar was released a year later after the Canadian government took up his case. The Syrian ambassador in Washington announced that no terrorist links had been found. Arar is suing the US government.

Amnesty International has highlighted the plight of two Yemeni friends, Salah Nasser Salim 'Ali, 27, and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah, 37, arrested separately in August 2003. Salah was detained in Indonesia, then flown to Jordan, where Muhammad was already under arrest. They say they were hung upside down and beaten for several days, before being flown to an unknown country about four hours' flying distance.

Neither man knew that the other was under arrest, but both described being detained in solitary confinement in an old underground prison, staffed by masked American guards, where western music was played in their cells 24 hours a day. Both men say they were moved after eight months, spending around three hours in a small aircraft, and then a helicopter, before being taken to another underground prison, this time modern, with air conditioning and surveillance cameras in the cells. This too was run by Americans, they say. The two men were returned to Yemen last May, but remain in custody. Amnesty says Yemeni officials have said they are being held at the request of US authorities. "What we have heard from these two men is just one small part of the much broader picture of US secret detentions around the world," said Sharon Critoph, the Amnesty researcher who interviewed them in Yemen.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1659302,00.html