The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

While the CIA admitted to Germany's then-Interior Minister Otto Schily that it had made a mistake, it has labored to keep the specifics of Masri's case from becoming public. As a German prosecutor works to verify or debunk Masri's claims of kidnapping and torture, the part of the German government that was informed of his ordeal has remained publicly silent. Masri's attorneys say they intend to file a lawsuit in U.S. courts this week.

Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."

The CIA declined to comment for this article, as did Coats and a spokesman at the German Embassy in Washington. Schily did not respond to several requests for comment last week.

...
A week before his release in late May 2004, Masri said he was visited in prison by a German man with a goatee who called himself Sam. Masri said he asked him if he were from the German government and whether the government knew he was there. Sam said he could not answer either question.

"Does my wife at least know I'm here?" Masri asked.
"No, she does not," Sam replied, according to Masri.
Sam told Masri he was going to be released soon but that he would not receive any documents or papers confirming his ordeal. The Americans would never admit they had taken him prisoner, Sam added, according to Masri.

...
Several intelligence and diplomatic officials said Macedonia did not want the CIA to bring Masri back inside the country, so the agency arranged for him to be flown to Albania. Masri said he was taken to a narrow country road at dusk. When they let him off, "They asked me not to look back when I started walking," Masri said. "I was afraid they would shoot me in the back."

He said he was quickly met by three armed men. They drove all night, arriving in the morning at Mother Teresa Airport in Tirana. Masri said he was escorted onto the plane, past all the security checkpoints, by an Albanian.

Masri has been reunited with his children and wife, who had moved the family to Lebanon because she did not know where her husband was. Unemployed and lonely, Masri says neither his German nor Arab friends dare associate with him because of the publicity.

US officials have refused to confirm or deny the existence of the secret facilities. But they have defended in general terms the country's use of tough tactics in its global war on terror.

In an interview with CNN, Hadley said there are certain kinds of operations "one cannot talk about."
"The terrorists threaten all of us," he said. "You've seen terror attacks in Britain, in Spain, in Italy, in Turkey, in Russia, in Egypt in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia. This is a threat, really, to the civilized world.

"We need to cooperate together to deal with this terrorist threat that threatens all of us. We're cooperating with a number of countries.

"That cooperation though is characterized by three things: One, we comply with the US Constitution. US laws and US treaty obligations. Secondly, we respect the sovereignty of those countries with whom we cooperate. And three, we do not move people around the world so that they can be tortured."

Asked specifically whether Washington operates secret prisons in Europe, he repeated that Rice will address the issue.

But if such operations were going on "they're the kinds of things that one cannot talk about.
"Why? Because the information would help the enemy. It would compromise the operations and it would put countries who are cooperating with us at risk," he said, stressing that it should not be inferred from his remarks that secret CIA prisons exist.

When the 40-seat turboprop landed in St. John's one recent Friday evening, there was no reason to believe ghosts were involved in the procedure.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration recorded everything anyone would need to know, it seemed, about the fixed-wing, multi-engine plane, registration number N196D, built in 2003 and registered as a corporate jet.

The corporation is identified as Devon Holding and Leasing Inc., headquartered at a downtown address in Lexington, N.C.

And that is when the ghosts appear.

There is no Devon Holding and Leasing Inc. at 129 W. Center St. in Lexington, N.C. There is no phone listing. The city offices have never heard of it; neither has the Chamber of Commerce.
The law offices of James A. Gleason are at 129 W. Center St., but five days of inquiries there failed to yield an answer to this simple question: Does anyone in this office know of a company called Devon Holding and Leasing?

It is almost certainly a CIA shell company, existing on paper only, and the turboprop was likely carrying a "ghost" prisoner to a country where torture is used during interrogations.

Such covert flights, known as "extraordinary renditions," became infamous in Canada in the case of Maher Arar, the Ottawa man who was tortured in Syria after being whisked away from New York's John F. Kennedy Airport as a suspected terrorist.

The United States denies it tortures suspects.

Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the US corporate media are covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church.

A recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) posting of one of forty-four US military autopsy reports reads as follows: "Final Autopsy Report: DOD 003164, (Detainee) Died as a result of asphyxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) due to strangulation as evidenced by the recently fractured hyoid bone in the neck and soft tissue hemorrhage extending downward to the level of the right thyroid cartilage. Autopsy revealed bone fracture, rib fractures, contusions in mid abdomen,
back and buttocks extending to the left flank, abrasions, lateral buttocks. Contusions, back of legs and knees; abrasions on knees, left fingers and encircling to left wrist. Lacerations and superficial cuts, right 4th and 5th fingers. Also, blunt force injuries, predominately recent contusions (bruises) on the torso and lower extremities. Abrasions on left wrist are consistent with use of restraints. No evidence of defense injuries or natural disease. Manner of death is homicide. Whitehorse Detainment Facility, Nasiriyah, Iraq."

The ACLU website further reveals how: "a 27-year-old Iraqi male died while being interrogated by Navy Seals on April 5, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq. During his confinement he was hooded, flex-cuffed, sleep deprived and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood. The exact cause of death was "undetermined" although the autopsy stated that hypothermia may have contributed to his death.
Another Iraqi detainee died on January 9, 2004, in Al Asad, Iraq, while being interrogated. He was standing, shackled to the top of a doorframe with a gag in his mouth, at the time he died. The cause of death was asphyxia and blunt force injuries.

So read several of the 44 US military autopsy reports on the ACLU website -evidence of extensive abuse of US detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan 2002 through 2004. Anthony Romero, Executive Director of ACLU stated, "There is no question that US interrogations have resulted in deaths." ACLU attorney Amrit Sing adds, "These documents present irrefutable evidence that US operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogations."

CIA agents have broken ranks to reveal the 'cruel and inhuman' interrogation techniques they are ordered to use at secret prisons around the world, including freezing and near-drowning.

...
The existence of these detention facilities, and what happens inside them, are the most secret aspect of America's "war on terror". In contrast to military-run camps and prisons such as Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where it was impossible to shield all CIA activity from outside scrutiny, the location of the "black sites" and the identities of those held there are made known only to a handful of senior officials in the US. In the host countries, only the president and top intelligence officials are aware of them.

Details of the secret prisons and the methods used in them have emerged mainly from CIA officers themselves, who said the public needed to know "the direction their agency has chosen". They broke ranks amid a furore in Washington over an amendment to the White House military spending package going through Congress. Senator John McCain (Republican), a former US navy pilot who was captured and tortured in Vietnam, wants an unequivocal ban on all "cruel and inhuman" treatment of prisoners in US custody, including those held by the CIA.

...
At least one death has been reported elsewhere, however. In a CIA facility in Kabul known as the "Salt Pit", an officer, described as young and inexperienced, used the "cold treatment" on a detainee, who was left outdoors, naked, throughout a freezing Afghan night. He died of hypothermia. The case is being investigated, along with several others in Afghanistan and Iraq where interrogators - CIA officers, civilian contractors or members of the special forces - went well beyond the guidelines and suspects died as a result.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US Secretary of State, said last week that he knew of more than 70 "questionable deaths" of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90.

German government officials were yesterday at pains to stress that the flight list gave no indication of what the suspected CIA aircraft were carrying. Wolfgang Bosbach, a senior conservative in Mrs Merkel's government said: "I assume that the German authorities were not informed about these alleged CIA prisoner flights. If they did know about them, this would amount to a massive infringement of the European Convention on Human Rights," he added.

However, the German section of Amnesty International insisted that the German authorities were aware of what the flights were being used for. "We have reported on these CIA kidnappings for some time, those responsible must have known about these flights," said Barbara Lochbihler, from Amnesty.

Ms Rice is scheduled to meet with Mrs Merkel and Franz-Walter Steinmeier, her foreign minister during her visit. All three politicians will be under pressure to answers the allegations.

Ms Rice has said that she will provide an answer to an EU letter of complaint on the issue complied by Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary. However, reports ahead of her visit suggested that she was in no mood to dwell on the issue.

One official involved in drafting her response in Washington was quoted in the Washington Post as saying: "The key point will be 'We're all in this together and you need to look at yourselves as much as us'. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

The British government is guilty of breaking international law if it allowed secret CIA "rendition" flights of terror suspects to land at UK airports, according to a report by American legal scholars.

Merely giving permission for the flights to refuel while en route to the Middle East to collect a prisoner would constitute a breach of the law, according to the opinion commissioned by an all-party group of MPs, which meets in parliament for the first time today.

The report comes as the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, arrives in Europe for a trip that has been overshadowed by the growing dispute about the CIA's use of rendition - the term used to describe the abduction of suspects who are taken to countries where they can be questioned outside the protection of US law.

Several European governments, as well as the EU, have launched investigations into hundreds of CIA flights which have shuttled through the continent. Fresh revelations in Germany at the weekend show that CIA aircraft have landed in the country on 437 occasions. The Washington Post also reported that dozens of prisoners had been wrongly taken under rendition, with some kidnapped in their home countries and held incommunicado for weeks.

Ms Rice has promised to clarify the issue. Yesterday, however, US officials made it clear she was likely to respond robustly to any questioning from European leaders.

All this suggests European governments may not push Ms Rice too hard for fear of embarrassing themselves as well as her. Germany, in particular, has another possible motive for playing down the affair. Its new chancellor, Angela Merkel, who will meet Ms Rice tomorrow, wants better relations with Washington, not another damaging row.

All the same, the escalating rendition controversy has reawakened Europe's worst nightmares about the Bush administration's perceived disdain for international law, its apparent willingness to flout human rights norms and the tendency of its policies to ensnare and compromise its allies. It can only deepen European public hostility and place further strains on transatlantic ties.

And even if Ms Rice's tactics work and governments conspire to build a wall of silence, national parliaments, the UN, the European commission, the Council of Europe, human rights groups and American and European media have all launched inquiries and will continue to demand answers. If nothing else is certain, it seems this particular CIA operation has been blown for good.

Legal advice sought by an all-party parliamentary group, which meets for the first time today, concluded that the British Government would be guilty of breaking international law if it allowed secret flights to use UK airports, it was reported last night. Academics from New York University said: "A state which aids or assists another state in the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally responsible for doing so."

The British Government has insisted that there is nothing wrong with the CIA flying planes through British airspace, and admits that it does not know or ask whether there are any prisoners on the flights.

According to The Washington Post, the US Government has pressed Berlin not to complain about the CIA's wrongful alleged kidnapping and imprisonment of Khaled Masri, a German who says he was abducted in Macedonia and tortured at a US base in Afghanistan.

Despite the controversy, the US State Department believes that there is little appetite among European governments to take on the US over its tactics in the war on terror.

French airports, too, have received "Guantanamo Express" flights. The first identified flight dates back to 31 March 2002. The flight plan shows that Learjet N221SG took off at 1336 hours from Keflavik, Iceland, bound for Brest-Guipavas, from where it apparently set off again for Turkey. Its point of departure was St John's, Newfoundland.

Canadian security authorities are also investigating this Learjet's comings and goings. This stopover on the coast of Brittany was probably necessitated by the limited range of this twin-engine 6/8 seater, which cannot fly between Guantanamo and Turkey non-stop. The Guipavas airport authorities have found a record of this flight; they told Le Figaro that, according to information given by the crew, they were the only ones on board that day. After Brest, the aircraft set off for Rome for another stopover.

Another flight by an aircraft known to have been used by the CIA occurred 20 July 2005: Gulfstream III, with the serial number N50BH, landed at Paris Le Bourget airport at 1922 hours, from Oslo Gardemoein, according to the Norwegian daily, Ny Tid. At the Paris airport, US government aircraft are generally received by Aeroservices, which is located near the Air and Space Museum, but it is likely that this jet was received by a service company based in a more discreet area.

The aircraft also landed 10 times in Canada and six times in Guantanamo. It is a twin-engine jet capable of crossing the Atlantic without stopovers and it belongs to a New York firm. It entrusts its management to RSVPair, which leases it for 4,550 dollars an hour.

Overflights and even stopovers by so-called "CIA" aircraft can take place without the knowledge of France's official services. A private aircraft arriving from outside the Schengen space can pass freely, as long as it produces a flight plan. The flight plan, a technical document addressed primarily to air traffic control but also communicated to the border police and customs authorities, shows the registration number of the aircraft, its speed, altitude, itinerary and range. It shows only the number of passengers. The identity and passport numbers of the passengers are recorded on the "passport manifest", a list filled out when the flight is outside the Schengen space. It is likely that several CIA flights passed anonymously through France, and other European countries, and that almost 20 different aircraft were used.

'Impossible position'

Allegations have potential to damage Europe as well as America

While the US will continue to face questions about whether secret prisons exist, European governments will also be pressed on how much they knew.

The US assertion that it respects the sovereignty of other nations suggests that it would have informed their allies of their activities - at least to some extent.

Tom Malinowski, Washington-based Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch, says Ms Rice is in an impossible position.

Mr Malinowski says she cannot confirm the allegations because they are true, and she cannot deny them because that would put European allies in an extremely difficult position.

He also questions the wisdom of the European Commission to threaten sanctions against any country that may have housed secret prisons.

In his view, the EU should be doing the opposite - encouraging members states to come clean.

'The biggest loser'

But it is the US and its image that will suffer the most.

US reassurances that it does not allow the torture of prisoners will count for little if no-one can see what is really going on.