The Sunday Times has revealed that “The American military have been operating flights across Europe using a call sign assigned to a civilian airline that they have no legal right to use.”
Sunday Times analysis of flight plans and radio logs have produced evidence of clandestine operations including an arms delivery to war-torn Central Africa in defiance of a UN embargo and at least one case of a CIA plane known to be used for “extraordinary rendition” leaving “a US air base just after the arrival of an aircraft using the bogus call sign.”
AfterDowningStreet only copied the first page of the report. On the second page, as DailyKos diarist Plutonium Page notes:
Two days later, on February 26, the aircraft left Pristina for Tuzla. A short while after that, a Gulfstream 5 executive jet, call sign JGO 47, flew from Tuzla to Aviano, arriving at 23.11 GMT. The next day, a Learjet 35 using the call sign SPAR 92 left Aviano for an unknown destination.
SPAR is short for Special Air Resources, an American military airlift service that transports senior military officers and civilian VIPs.
However, SPAR 92 has been identified as the aircraft which was used by the CIA secretly to transport a Muslim preacher who was kidnapped by CIA agents in Milan in 2003.
A USAFE spokesman last week said American aircraft using the JGO call sign were performing “Joint Guard Operations” for the Nato/European peacekeeping mission in the Balkans.
However, inquiries have shown that the military operation called “Joint Guard” ended in 1998. They also show that none of the US aircraft deployed in it match ones using the JGO call sign.
Italy: CIA e-mail ties agents to abduction
By John Crewdson
20 January 2006 Chicago Tribune
In addition to representing an implicit acknowledgement by the CIA that its operatives were responsible for the kidnapping, Italian prosecutors said, warning them to stay beyond the reach of the investigating authorities in Milan represented a possible obstruction of justice.
“The only obstacle was not for investigation but for sending them in prison,” Armando Spataro, the chief anti-terrorism prosecutor in Milan, said in an e-mail to the Tribune. “If they were in Italy, we could arrest them.”
Spataro said he planned to ask U.S. authorities to question the woman who wrote to Lady under a mutual legal assistance treaty between Italy and the U.S. “According to our criminal code, someone who helps other people to escape, when there’s a warrant or the possibility of a warrant, is responsible for a crime,” Spataro said.
The prosecutors have been unable to identify the author of the “don’t go there” message or to determine her whereabouts, although databases accessible by the Tribune show she is living in Washington, D.C.
In a D.C. safehouse pissing on mutual agreements with the other criminals.