Billing Dispute Reveals Details of Secret CIA Rendition Flights
September 1st, 2011Via: Washington Post:
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.
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’s program, a significant part of its operation was entrusted to very small aviation companies whose previous experience involved flying sports teams across the country.
The August 2003 flights — and dozens of others to locations such as Bucharest, Romania; Baku, Azerbaijan; Cairo; Djibouti; Islamabad, Pakistan; and Tripoli, Libya — were organized by Sportsflight, a one-man aircraft brokerage business on Long Island. It secured a plane from Richmor Aviation, based near the Columbia County Airport in Hudson, N.Y. Richmor eventually sued Sportsflight for breach of contract. In the process, the costs and itineraries of numerous CIA flights became part of the court record.
In other cases, the government has invoked the “state secrets” privilege to shut down litigation over the CIA program, but the case in Columbia County proceeded uninterrupted in an almost empty courtroom. There were only two witnesses at the bench trial: Richmor President Mahlon Richards and the owner of Sportsflight, Donald Moss.
In a 2009 judgment, largely upheld on appeal this year, Judge Paul Czajka awarded Richmor more than $1 million.
Isn’t that nice.
CIA contractors and their captives get to jet around the world in multi-million dollar private jets with wet bar, on-demand in-flight video, friendly hostesses and satellite phones…
…while the proles must submit to anal probes and all the touchy-feely love the TSA has to give before being herded onto high-tech cattle cars and fed colorful molded plastic objects shaped like familiar foods.
Which part about this contrast doesn’t point a long, bony finger straight at the long-standing reality that the OSS/CIA is essentially a country club for the global mafia and the will to power crowd that oversees their day-to-day operations?