Power and torture - by Mark Mardell (the Cia Midnight Express)
If you are offered a cheap flight on "Stevens Express" or "Premier Executive" my advice is: don't take it. I hear the food is atrocious and in-cabin service particularly poor on "Presidential aviation". These are some of the cover names used by the CIA for flights, which the Council of Europe claims were used to move kidnapped suspected terrorists through European airspace, and European airports, to countries where they could be tortured.
The flight log reads like the route plan of a particularly desperate budget airline. Banjul to Cairo, to Kabul, to Tashkent, to Frankfurt, to Turkey, to Rabat back to Kabul, sounds like a packed five days. Now the Council of Europe has voted that foreign intelligence services operating in Europe should be much more closely monitored, within a strict system of rules setting out what is legal and what is not. "Will the European States in question listen, of course not - they apply the rule "Do as I say, not as I do."
