Norwegian official’s tongue slips?
I have previously commented on the CIA’s illegal use of Norwegian air space and air fields, and my focus here is this: I think Rumsfeld may have been caught in an obvious lie.
The CIA planes have allegedly used the airports of Stavanger (Sola) and Oslo (Gardermoen) a number of times over the last few years.
At lot of controversy was sparked this summer, when this Boeing MD-80 ( DC-9-82 ), with registration N822US, officially used by the United States Marshals Service at least until March of 2003 and allegedly used in CIA service, made an illegal stop-over at Sola airport on June 1 of this year, and again on June 18. Government flights are required to obtain special permission to land. The plane came from Bucuresti, and after stopping at Stavanger for a little over an hour for refueling, it continued to the US Naval Air Station at Keflavik, Iceland. No one was allowed access to the plane at Sola airport.
The N822US was owned by Alameda Corp., Alameda, California after 23 May 2002. Later, the plane was used by the US Departement of Justice as well as the USMS. The plane has been used for prisoner transport on a regular basis in the US as well as in other countries.
The Norwegian daily Stavanger Aftenblad, which has reported extensively on these planes, reported Saturday that at least ten different aircraft seen at Sola are likely to be undercover US government planes and have thus used Sola airport illegally a number of times since 2003. Below is another one, the N818US, photographed on 25 September 2003.
Both the N818US and the N822US had previously been owned and used by US Air, later US Airways, and the N818US had just spent a year parked in the Mojave desert prior to its flight to Stavanger.
A third plane is this McDonnell Douglas DC-9-31, registered N920VJ, photographed at Sola on 18 June 2003.
The USMS also ran/runs the company Justice Prisoner & Alien Transportation System, based in Oklahoma City. Stavanger Aftenblad (sorry, the articles above are in Norwegian) reports that MD-80 planes from the US Departement of Justice have also used Sola airport. The plane in question on June 1, N822US, was “transferred to other users,” according to the USMS. The owner is officially registered as Alameda Corp., Trustee, 12400 Highway 281 N Ste 150, San Antonio, Texas 78216. The serial number of the plane is 49139. This information was readily available to anyone.
The New York Times reported on June 31st on how the CIA established Aero Contractors Ltd in 1979 as an extension of Air America (used extensively during the Vietnam war, but closed down in 1976). Alamada Corp. is allegedly one of the companies behind Aero Contractors.
When the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs “inqured” into the matter of the June 1 stop-over, the US response was reported to be “no knowledge.” This was also Rumsfeld’s claim when he visited the Nato base at Jattå/Stavanger a week later. There was "not an ounce" of connection to the government as far as he or anyone in the DoD knew. He added “Obviously, you don’t know what you don’t know.”. You can hear his response here (Click the audio link under the headline.) One week after the official Norwegian request was made and Norwegian press had tracked down the plane, Rumsfeld still had no idea whose plane this was and what it was doing. The US gave no other official explanation.
Since this fall, a labour-socialist-center government has taken over in Norway, and previously outspoken critics of the US war on terror have received ministrial posts. This includes the new foreign secretary, who resigned the post of general secretary of the Norwegian Red Cross to join the new government.
On November 16, Norwegian officials met with of the US Embassy, with whom they had an "undramatic" conversation. Responding to questions from journalists, prime minister Jens Stoltenberg simply stated that "When the Americans say the planes were not in government service, we must believe them."
(Angered by this, I took advantage of the opportunity to quiz the foreign secretary at an open internet session two weeks ago. He confirmed that he was completely comfortable with the prime minister's response. Alas, even the head of the national Red Cross will cop out for a taste of power.)
Now, this is all bad enough, but today I came across an article which made Rumsfeld’s comments and the official US response at the time, seem even more interesting:
The article was written on November 16, the day of the meeting with the US Embassy representatives and our prime minister’s pathetic display. By now it had been documented that another plane in US government service, N50BH, had landed at Gardermoen, Oslo’s main airport, on July 20. The N50BH was owned by Crystal Jet Aviation, based in Albany, New York.
As late as November 12, the Norwegian daily Aftenposten reported that the US never replied to the Norwegian request for information about the MD-80, and that the US never comments on CIA activity.
In the November 16 article, Anne Lene Dale Sandsten of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the MoFA has no reason to believe that the US has done “anything wrong” with respect to the Gardermoen landing. She then goes on, referring to the MoFA’s request for information after the June 1 landing of the MD-80 at Sola: ”The Americans informed us at the time that there had been no prisoners onboard.”
That’s astonishing.
So, Rumsfeld is basically saying: “We have absolutely no knowledge about this so-called United States Marshals Service plane, since we don’t know what we don’t know, but I stress that no prisoners were onboard when the plane didn’t land at Sola airport.”