The Boston Globe's Farah Stockman has a great piece today on a Gulf Stream used for extraordinary rendition that is owned by one of the Boston Red Sox owners:

Team vice chairman Phillip H. Morse, a businessman who made a fortune developing cardiac catheters, leases the Gulfstream IV jet with a Hudson, N.Y., charter agent when he is not using it. The jet sometimes has a small Red Sox logo on the fuselage near the door.

The jet, which used registration number N85VM and now uses N227SV, was spotted in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003, shortly after a suspected extremist preacher disappeared from his home in Milan in a case that Italian prosecutors are investigating as a kidnapping, according to the Chicago Tribune...

The preacher, known as Abu Omar, but whose given name is Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, was also taken to the Cairo airport the same day in 2003, the Tribune reported. The newspaper also reported that the plane has made at least 51 trips between June 2002 and January to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the United States is holding about 540 people at the base as terror suspects.

Omar called his relatives months later to say that Italian and American agents had kidnapped him and flown him to Cairo, where he was tortured, according to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and Italian government documents.

Read the whole piece.

Update: "Phillip H. Morse, a minority partner of the Boston Red Sox, confirmed yesterday that his private jet has been chartered to the CIA and said he was aware that it had been flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 500 terrorism suspects are held, as well as other overseas destinations..."

Posted by Laura at March 20, 2005 09:48 AM