Guardian: Twist to terror suspects row... 80 CIA planes visited UK

Twist to terror suspects row as logs show 80 CIA planes visited UK

Stephen Grey and Luke Harding in Berlin
Thursday December 1, 2005
The Guardian

The transatlantic row over the secret transfer of terror suspects by
the Bush administration took a new twist yesterday when it emerged that
more than 300 flights operated by the CIA had landed at European
airports.

According to flight logs seen by the Guardian, Britain was second only
to Germany as a transit hub for the CIA, which stands accused of
operating a covert network of interrogation centres in eastern Europe.
Several European governments have launched urgent investigations into
whether clandestine CIA flights were used in the aftermath of September
11 to transfer Islamist prisoners to third countries where they could
be interrogated beyond the reach of international law.

While the logs show unprecedented CIA activity, they do not show
which planes were involved in prisoner transfers. In October and
December 2003 a CIA Boeing flew from RAF Northolt to Tripoli while
the CIA and MI6 were negotiating with Libya over its weapons of mass
destruction programme. In January 2004 the same Boeing was allegedly
involved in shipping suspects to a US prison in Afghanistan.

The European Council has appointed a special investigator and is
examining possible human rights violations by member countries. The
European Union has launched an inquiry and the Austrian government
has asked the US to explain a US C-130 Hercules that flew into its
airspace. The flight logs were obtained from Federal Aviation
Administration data and sources in the aviation industry.