CIA Flights: Special Treatment for Uncle Sam?

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CIA Flights: Special Treatment for Uncle Sam?
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2007-07-11 19:40. Evidence

By John Goetz, Marcel Rosenbach and Andreas Wassermann, Der Spiegel

About 390 CIA-run flights through German airspace were in violation of German law, and Berlin could have collected millions of euros in fines. Now internal investigations could make things embarrassing for Gerhard Schröder's government as well as the United States.

When air traffic controllers hear the code words "ATFM exempt," they know to expect something drastic. Airlines use the code to report a flight when it has sick or severely injured passengers - or heads of state - on board. The code is the air-traffic equivalent of flashing blue lights on a city street.

On July 19, 2002, a Gulfstream business jet took off from Frankfurt am Main bound for Amman, Jordan. The flight received an ATFM exempt, although it carried neither patients nor politicians. Instead, the jet was carrying a CIA team that took a Mauritanian terrorism suspect into custody a short time later and eventually flew him to Guántánamo.

This camouflaging of an illegal kidnapping as a rescue flight was no isolated incident. SPIEGEL has obtained complete lists of the flight plans of secret CIA flights in German airspace, which reveal 390 takeoffs and landings of CIA aircraft at airports in Germany between 2002 and 2006. The documents also show that mis-identifying the flights was part of a system designed to dodge compliance with complicated approval regulations.

If the CIA had registered the flight plans correctly, it would have been required to provide details on the purpose of the flights. And once the true reasons for travel were reported - say, as "kidnapping" or "war on terror" - Germany's Federal Department of Aviation, the LBA, would have become suspicious (to say the least).

These deceptive maneuvers by the CIA have become the subject of intense scrutiny and debate within German political circles - from the Ministry of Transportation and the LBA to the Chancellery. Soon a parliamentary committee set up to investigate the German foreign intelligence agency (or BND) will also take up the matter. On Thursday the committee appointed Joachim Jacob, a former federal data protection commissioner, as special investigator on the issue of secret CIA flights. Jacob's job is to determine how much the German government knew about the flights, which European Council investigator Dick Marty has called a "series of illegal acts" by the CIA.

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