No Geneva Convention at 35,000 feet!
Mysterious Jet Tied to Torture Flights — What a great story! Bloggers will be all over it.
The Central Intelligence Agency has declined to discuss the plane. But one retired CIA officer said that he understood the Gulfstream had been operated by the Joint Special Operations Command, an interagency unit that organizes counterterrorist operations in conjunction with the CIA and military special forces.
Leonard T. Bayard–whoever he may or may not be–became the sole owner of the mysterious Gulfstream jet on Nov. 16, according to public records compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The records show that Bayard Foreign Marketing purchased the plane, for an undisclosed sum, from Premier Executive Transport Services, whose address is the same as that of a Dedham, Mass., law firm that incorporated Premier Executive in January 1994.
The Massachusetts law firm’s address is shared by a second company, Crowell Aviation Technologies Inc., which according to Dun & Bradstreet claims to have only a single employee and $65,000 in annual revenue.
Government records show, however, that Crowell is one of only nine companies, along with Premier Executive, that has Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide.
I always thought the ban on torture was based on practicality too. It’s hard to get reliable information and unless you just want a confession so you can kill someone the process is useless. I mean, for example, you might get all sorts of information about WMDs when there are none and stupidly go into a war because of the bad information. It could happen!
via A. Vance
I’ve lived in countries that use torture and, in those countries, you can never ever trust that the legal system has convicted the real crimminal.
The mistaken WMD intelligence did not result from torture.
It resulted from Iraqi officials, generals, and scientists deceiving Saddam Hussein and each other. Saddam doled out money to continue development, but it all got pocketed or diverted. So all the generals and scientists thought the other unit or lab next door was working on or had WMD. And that’s what the CIA and other agencies heard. The western intellence agencies would have had to unravel internal Iraq conspiracy and fraud in order to get at the truth.
Of course the inspectors did not find anything. But it’s impossible to prove a negative. Hans Blix said so himself in his book. That’s why inspections are about verifying the statements of a cooperating government, not detective work. Consider the IAEA’s performance in North Korea.
(But there are still plenty of arguments that we should not have gone to war, including immenence of the threat, occupational hazards, and the knock-you-over-the-head unreliability of past intelligence.)