ilimanation

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 Guant?namo 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.Inquiries From AbroadThe authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the C.I.A.?s alleged role in the seizure of suspects in those countries who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation. According to Dr. Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.Dr. Nolte examined the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who American officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec. 31, 2003, and held for three weeks. Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan.The episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on C.I.A. flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Mr. Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the C.I.A.-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Mr. Masri?s passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.Mr. Masri was later released by order of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients? identities. ?We?ve been doing business with the government for a long time, and one of the reasons is, we don?t talk about it,? said Robert W. Blowers, Aero?s assistant manager.A Varied FleetBut records filed with the Federal Aviation Administration provide a detailed, if incomplete, portrait of the agency?s aviation wing.The fleet includes a World War II-era DC-3 and a sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, as well as workhorse Hercules transport planes and Spanish-built aircraft that can drop into tight airstrips. The flagship is the Boeing Business Jet, based on the 737 model, which Aero flies from Kinston, N.C., because the runway at Johnston County is too short for it.Most of the shell companies that are the planes? nominal owners hold permits to land at American military bases worldwide, a clue to their global mission. Flight records show that at least 11 of the aircraft have landed at Camp Peary, the Virginia base where the C.I.A. operates its training facility, known as ?the Farm.? Several planes have also made regular trips to Guant?namo.But the facility that turns up most often in records of the 26 planes is little Johnston County Airport, which mainly serves private pilots and a few local corporations. At one end of the 5,500-foot runway are the modest airport offices, a flight school and fuel tanks. At the other end are the hangars and offices of Aero Contractors, down a tree-lined driveway named for Charlie Day, an airplane mechanic who earned a reputation as an engine magician working on secret operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.?To tell you the truth, I don?t know what they do,? said Ray Blackmon, the airport manager, noting that Aero has its own mechanics and fuel tanks, keeping nosey outsiders away. But he called the Aero workers ?good neighbors,? always ready to lend a tool.Son of Air AmericaAero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated air ?proprietary,? as agency-controlled companies are called.Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by corporate records.?Jim is one of the great untold stories of heroic work for the U.S. government,? said Bill Leary, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia who has written about the C.I.A.?s air operations. Mr. Rhyne had a prosthetic leg - he had lost one leg to enemy antiaircraft fire in Laos - that was blamed for his death in a 2001 crash while testing a friend?s new plane at Johnston County Airport.Mr. Rhyne had chosen the rural airfield in part because it was handy to Fort Bragg and many Special Forces veterans, and in part because it had no tower from which Aero?s operations could be spied on, a former pilot said.?Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and come out in the middle of the night with another,? said the former pilot. He asked not to be identified because when he was hired, after responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the C.I.A., he signed a secrecy agreement.While flying for Aero in the 1980?s and 1990?s, the pilot said, he ferried King Hussein, Jordan?s late ruler, around the United States; kept American-backed rebels like Jonas Savimbi of Angola supplied with guns and food; hopped across the jungles of Colombia to fight the drug trade; and retrieved shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and other weapons from former Soviet republics in Central Asia.Ferrying Terrorism SuspectsAero?s planes were sent to Fort Bragg to pick up Special Forces operatives for practice runs in the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina, dropping supplies or attempting emergency ?exfiltrations? of agents, often at night, the former pilot said. He described flying with $50,000 in cash strapped to his legs to buy fuel and working under pseudonyms that changed from job to job.He does not recall anyone using the word ?rendition.? ?We used to call them ?snatches,? ? he said, recalling half a dozen cases. Sometimes the goal was to take a suspect from one country to another. At other times, the C.I.A. team rescued allies, including five men believed to have been marked by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, for assassination.Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.?s air operations. Aero?s staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004, according to Dun and Bradstreet.Despite the difficulty of determining the purpose of any single flight or who was aboard, the pattern of flights that coincide with known events is striking.When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of Dec. 13, 2003, a Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from Dulles Airport in Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day by the Boeing Business Jet, also flying from Washington.Flights on this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were the first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad since the beginning of the war.Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri?s deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guant?namo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gambia.Most recently, flight records show the Boeing Business Jet traveling from Sudan to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on April 17, and returning to Sudan on April 22. The trip coincides with a visit of the Sudanese intelligence chief to Washington that was reported April 30 by The Los Angeles Times.Mysterious CompaniesAs the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation Administration?s online registry.So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations.On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers? offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee.No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon, in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as 1949.Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such name on more than one company was ?bad tradecraft: you shouldn?t allow an element of one entity to lead to others.?He said one method used in setting up past C.I.A. proprietaries was to ask real people to volunteer to serve as officers or directors. ?It was very, very easy to find patriotic Americans who were willing to help,? he said.Such an approach may have been used with Aero Contractors. William J. Rogers, 84, of Maine, said he was asked to serve on the Aero board in the 1980?s because he was a former Navy pilot and past national commander of the American Legion. He knew the company did government work, but not much more, he said. ?We used to meet once or twice a year,? he said.Aero?s president, according to corporate records, is Norman Richardson, a North Carolina businessman who once ran a truck stop restaurant called Stormin? Norman?s. Asked about his role with Aero, Mr. Richardson said only: ?Most of the work we do is for the government. It?s on the basis that we can?t say anything about it.?Secrecy Is DifficultAero?s much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976 just as the United States Senate?s Church Committee issued a mixed report on the value of the C.I.A.?s use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned whether the nation would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment appears prescient.When one C.I.A. official told the committee that a new air proprietary should be created only if ?we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is C.I.A.,? Lawrence R. Houston, then agency?s general counsel, objected.In the aviation industry, said Mr. Houston, who died in 1995, ?everybody knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions.?He concluded: ?I don?t think you can do a real cover operation.?Ford Fessenden contributed reporting for this article.This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams and written by Mr. Shane

Notice from dundun2007: Spamming post from article lost of hosting credits plus warning

You may think this is overblown. But discussion of the possibility of a flu pandemic has fallen out of the news. And as the security consultant Bruce Schneier says: ?One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it?s in the news, don?t worry about it. By definition, ?news? means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it?s probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported - automobile deaths, domestic violence - when it?s so common that it?s not news, then you should start worrying.?The risks posed by an outbreak of flu passed from chickens in the Far East, in coutries such as Vietnam and Thailand, burst into the news in February. But now they?ve passed out of the news. Since then we?ve had more important things, like the Crazy Frog ringtone, to concern us.Time to worry. And the scientists are. In fact, they?re edgier than I?ve seen them since the BSE outbreak was in its earliest days and people were wondering if it might pass to humans. Quite a few scientists stopped eating beef at that point. Oh, you didn?t know?The theme of the person awaking from a deep sleep or coma to find a world utterly changed is a popular one in science fiction. From John Wyndham?s book The Day of The Triffids through The Omega Man to the recent film 28 Days Later, the trope of the man arising from his hospital bed to find that nothing is as it was has become well-worn.That?s fine - as long as it remains just a story. But if - when - a flu pandemic comes, and millions of people die around the world over a period of months, the reality will be one of two alternatives. It?s either going to be like those films, with videoconferencing suddenly all the rage, local farm produce making a big profit, empty supermarket shelves (you have to ship the oil, and distribute the fuel, but can the Armed Forces really do all that?), tumbleweed blowing in the streets, a medieval attitude to anyone not from ?around here?.Or else governments will impose a police state that will make all the ID cards and airport checks look like a tea party. You?d not be allowed to move anywhere without showing off a vaccination certificate. (Sure, you?d get those on the black market, and they?d cost more than ?300, but would you really want them? If you?re not vaccinated would you really want to travel among people who might be carriers?) Or it might be both at once.One more thing. You might well be one of those millions who die in such a pandemic. If you travel to work on public transport; if colleagues in your company travel by air to Asia; if you?re travelling abroad through a busy airport. You?ll probably touch someone or share air with someone who?s infected. The premise of Terry Gilliam?s Twelve Monkeys will become reality.You may think this is overblown. But discussion of the possibility of a flu pandemic has fallen out of the news. And as the security consultant Bruce Schneier says: ?One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it?s in the news, don?t worry about it. By definition, ?news? means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it?s probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported - automobile deaths, domestic violence - when it?s so common that it?s not news, then you should start worrying.?The risks posed by an outbreak of flu passed from chickens in the Far East, in coutries such as Vietnam and Thailand, burst into the news in February. But now they?ve passed out of the news. Since then we?ve had more important things, like the Crazy Frog ringtone, to concern us.Time to worry. And the scientists are. In fact, they?re edgier than I?ve seen them since the BSE outbreak was in its earliest days and people were wondering if it might pass to humans. Quite a few scientists stopped eating beef at that point. Oh, you didn?t know?Now, their reaction is to write papers and watch what?s happening, very closely. If you read the scientific journals (we do, so you don?t have to) the articles are piling up. Last week the journal Nature pulled together an entire online resource on the threat of avian flu.That?s the trouble with scientists. They get an idea into their heads - CFCs and ozone, carbon dioxide emissions and the greenhouse effect, the transmission of BSE to other species such as humans - and they worry away at it until they determine what the answer and the mechanism is.Here?s what?s they?re worrying about now. The First World War killed seven million people. But the strain of flu that followed it - incubated, experts reckon, in pigs that were kept near the front lines to help feed the troops - killed up to 100 million, helped by the movement of troops returning home from the war.Pandemics come around, on average, about every 70 years or so. There were small ones in 1957 and 1968/9, when ?Hong Kong flu? - strain H1N1 - spread around the world, and one million died. That was tiny by pandemic standards. The scientists reckon we?re overdue for an infectious, fatal strain of flu, one which can pass from human to human by the usual methods - sneezing or contact.There?s already a deadly strain of flu around - ?chicken flu?, better known to the scientists by the strain of flu virus that causes it: H5N1. But it only passes from chickens to humans, not from from person to person. If it could do that, it would have the potential to turn pandemic.But maybe it already can. There have already been a couple of cases of deaths from H5N1 where the only logical pathway is human-to-human. The UK government announced in February that it will buy in thousands of doses of Tamiflu as part of the UK Influenza Pandemic Contingency Plan.Too bad - the latest results suggest that Tamiflu isn?t effective against H5N1. And anyway, New Scientist reports, the UK?s order for 14.6 million five-day courses of Tamiflu treatment will take its patent owners Roche two years to fulfil. The company is still trying to develop ways to synthesise it from scratch.The consequences of a really big, fatal flu epidemic on modern society are hard to imagine, partly because they?re so enormous. Air passengers would be the first vector of infection, followed by the people who travelled with them in the train or Underground train or coach from the airport, followed by the family and friends of those people. Give it a few days and people would be falling ill, then over the next weeks dying.If the strain is new and unexpected, there wouldn?t be time to produce enough vaccine to treat it. According to a New England Journal of Medicine article by Dr Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis - who is also director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy - titled ?Preparing for the Next Pandemic?, the 1950s-era methods of producing vaccines means we would need (ironically enough) one chicken egg per person to produce the vaccine, plus six months to culture it.?The global economy would come to a halt, and since we could not expect appropriate vaccines to be available for many months and we have very limited stockpiles of antiviral drugs, we would be facing a 1918-like scenario,? notes Dr Osterholm, who calculates that given current technology, we could vaccinate about 500 million people, tops - about 14 per cent of the world population.Of course, most of those will be in the developed world. But are you sure you?d be one? Are you in the Armed Forces? Do you or your business count as an essential service? If you?re not involved with the electricity, water, fuel distribution, phone or gas industries, then probably not. ?And owing to our global ?just-in-time delivery? economy, we would have no surge capacity for health care, food supplies, and many other products and services,? Dr Osterholm adds.Let?s have some more numbers from Dr Osterholm, just to encourage you. He writes: ?It is sobering to realize that in 1968, when the most recent influenza pandemic occurred, the virus emerged in a China that had a human population of 790 million, a pig population of 5.2 million, and a poultry population of 12.3 million; today, these populations number 1.3 billion, 508 million, and 13 billion, respectively. Similar changes have occurred in the human and animal populations of other Asian countries, creating an incredible mixing vessel for viruses. Given this reality, as well as the exponential growth in foreign travel during the past 50 years, we must accept that a pandemic is coming - although whether it will be caused by H5N1 or by another novel strain remains to be seen.?All this has been noted by virologists and disease experts around the world. But what can we do? For one thing, listen to what they?re saying, and put some pressure on the politicians who are ignoring this threat, in the hope it will go away. Climate change may be a greater threat than terrorism, but a flu pandemic is a more immediate threat than either.Or, as Canada?s deputy chief public health officer, Dr Paul Gully, put it to the Toronto Star: ?Frankly the crisis could for all we know have started last night in some village in Southeast Asia. We don?t have any time to waste and even if we did have some time, the kinds of things we need to do will take years. Right now, the best we can do is try to survive it. We need a Manhattan Project yesterday.?Let?s hope they got started. Now, where?s the number of that forger for my vaccination certificate?

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