Boston Red Sox Plane Flies Through Shannon on way to Guantanamo

national | anti-war / imperialism | other press

Sunday March 20, 2005 18:12

by redjade

How weird can this story get?!

Quote: 'The Red Sox logo was visible, for example, in photos taken at an air show in Schenectady, N.Y., on Aug. 23, 2003, eight days after the Gulfstream returned to Washington from an around-the-world flight that included Anchorage; Osaka, Japan; Dubai; and Shannon.

The logo was not visible when the Gulfstream was photographed during a fuel stop in Shannon on June 12, 2004.'

See image of the plane at:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/images/0320-01.jpg

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Jet's Travels Cloaked in Mystery

by John Crewdson and Tom Hundley
the Knight-Ridder Tribune Newspaers

(KRT) - Last June, the Boston Red Sox chartered an executive jet to help their manager make a quick visit home in the midst of the team's championship season.

But what was the very same Gulfstream - owned by one of the Red Sox's partners, but presumably without the team's logo on its fuselage - doing in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003?

Perhaps by coincidence, Feb. 18, 2003, was the day an Islamic preacher known as Abu Omar, who had been abducted in Italy the previous day and forced aboard a small plane, also arrived at the Cairo airport.

Omar, whose given name is Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, was imprisoned by the Egyptians and, he claims, brutally tortured.

[....]

But Federal Aviation Administration records obtained by the Chicago Tribune show that Gulfstream N85VM has been many places around the world that the Red Sox have almost certainly never gone.

Between June 2002 and January of this year, the Gulfstream made 51 visits to Guantanamo, Cuba, site of the U.S. naval base where more than 500 terrorism suspects are behind bars.

[....]

A week later the Gulfstream was back in Washington, D.C., headed for Shannon, Ireland.

[....]

The Red Sox logo was visible, for example, in photos taken at an air show in Schenectady, N.Y., on Aug. 23, 2003, eight days after the Gulfstream returned to Washington from an around-the-world flight that included Anchorage; Osaka, Japan; Dubai; and Shannon.

The logo was not visible when the Gulfstream was photographed during a fuel stop in Shannon on June 12, 2004. But when the plane turned up at Denver's Centennial Airport in February of this year, a photo showed it was sporting not only the Sox logo but a new registration number, N227SV.

[....]

FAA records do show, however, that at 4:19 a.m. local time on Feb. 18, 2003, the Gulfstream was on the ground at HECA, the designation for Cairo International Airport, with a flight plan for a return to Dulles with a fuel stop in Shannon.