Destination Cairo: human rights fears over CIA flights

[Stockholm]

It was only a matter of time before the CIA caught up with Saad Iqbal Madni.

A Pakistani Islamist and, allegedly, a close associate of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, he turned up in Indonesia in November 2001, just as the Taliban regime was crumbling and members of al-Qaida were fleeing Afghanistan. Renting a room in a Jakarta boarding house, he told locals he had arrived to hand over an inheritance to his late father's second wife.

On January 9 2002, Iqbal was seized by Indonesian intelligence agents. Two days later, according to Indonesian officials, he was bundled aboard a Gulfstream V executive jet which had flown into a military airfield in the city. Then, without any extradition hearing or judicial process, he was flown to Cairo.

Iqbal, 24, had become the latest terrorism suspect to fall into a system known in US intelligence circles as "extraordinary rendition" - the apprehension of a suspect who is not placed on trial, or flown to Guantánamo, but taken to a country where torture is common.

more http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1567849,00.html

Really good investigative journalism by Ian Cobain, Stephen Grey and Richard Norton-Taylor. Tried to search for it on DU but I could not find it. Article covers Aero Contractors of Smithfield, North Carolina (2005 version of Air America) and their role in the shameful practice of extraordinary renditions or "snatches" as the CIA employees call it.

Other DU thread about renditions http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1803657