CIA scandal continues
So it seems the dreaded CIA interrogation camps the earlier news articles wrote about are/were not in Hungary (speculation seems to point toward Poland or Romania). Great, let’s hope that Hungary is really out of this mess.
But here is another mystery for you. Pocakos is writing about the plane N168D. You can read about this plane referred to as CIA charter flight in the New Your Times. [Henrik’s note: According to news that plane is proven to have landed at Budapest airport at least twice in the last years. Also you can find evidence of landing at Planepictures.net]
Pocakos goes further and found the public registration data of the plane in a Federal Aviation Administration Registry. An article from Denmark is also linked, where the “opposition party demands an explanation from the transport minister as to why an aircraft used by the CIA to transport suspected terrorists around the world landed in Copenhagen”.
He also found pieces about similar CIA plane stories, some are referred to as Guantanamo Bay Express and it also has its own Wikipedia entry.
The strange thing is – as Pocakos also point this out- that a leading Hungarian daily newspaper (Népszabadság) on the 3rd of November wrote that there is no plane with such registartion number as N168D, but one day later that actually there is (without referring to the previous day mess up).
Pocakos writes: “Admitting the fact of landing would not mean that there would be terrorist internment camps in Hungary. But the denial of the existence of this plane makes this “harmless” incident rather shady.”
(The referenced blog is in Hungarian)
I also have trouble with this story. The only eyewitness accounts we have in Poland are from an ex-director of the airport that this plane landed in. She says that five men on US passports got on the planec, but nobody got off.
More on this story at my own blog. Glad to see someone is doing something similar in Hungary
Comment by beatroot — November 9, 2005 @ 11:50 am
Thanks,
A different aspect in the Hungary case is that here the passangers once actually got off the plane and spent a night in the city in a very nice looking hotel. But I’m not sure anymore if that is a good sign or a bad sign…
Comment by Henrik — November 13, 2005 @ 8:33 pm