 | If true, there are a number of CIA employees who should be taking forced early retirement. |
WASHINGTON - While Secretary of State Rice fends off questioning in Europe over CIA-run air flights of prisoners in the war on terror, some analysts outside the CIA are asking how the flights were exposed so easily. The CIA's legendary capacity for stealth, celebrated in so many cloak-and-dagger books and films, seems to have been all but absent as hooded prisoners were zipped from one airport to another by agency airplanes, a journalist who helped prepare one of the first detailed reports on the air transfer program said. "I would say they didn't give a damn," Fredrik Laurin, a producer with a Swedish television show, "Kalla Fakta," or "Cold Facts," said when asked what priority the agency gave to keeping the air operation secret. "If I was an American taxpayer, I would be upset," Mr. Laurin said in a telephone interview from Sweden yesterday.
In May 2004, the Swedish show reported on the CIA's involvement with the expulsion of two men from Sweden to Egypt in December 2001. The tail number of an aircraft involved in the transfer led quickly to information about at least six other occasions on which the same small Gulfstream V jet was used to move prisoners from various locations to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. "Once we had the identity of the plane, which we were able to find out in many ways - a plane leaves a lot of traces - it was obvious the plane was fishy," Mr. Laurin said.
When a producer working on the broadcast called one of the American firms involved in leasing the plane, the call was returned 15 minutes later by the Swedish intelligence service, which said it was calling at the request of its "U.S. cooperation partners." |