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390 CIA Torture Flights In Germany Alone

“ATFM exempt,” they know to expect something drastic.

On July 19, 2002, a Gulfstream business jet took off from Frankfurt am Main bound for Amman, Jordan. The flight received an ATFM exempt, although it carried neither patients nor politicians. Instead, the jet was carrying a CIA team that took a Mauritanian terrorism suspect into custody a short time later and eventually flew him to Guántánamo.

This camouflaging of an illegal kidnapping as a rescue flight was no isolated incident. SPIEGEL has obtained complete lists of the flight plans of secret CIA flights in German airspace, which reveal 390 takeoffs and landings of CIA aircraft at airports in Germany between 2002 and 2006. The documents also show that mis-identifying the flights was part of a system designed to dodge compliance with complicated approval regulations.