Blackwater-backed Torture Flights Caught in the UK

Blackwater USA, the nefarious sounding and behaving contracting company, whose reputation for treachery rivals Halburton's, has been linked to a plane being used to shuttle "terror suspects" to secret prisons in Poland and Romania. These "torture flights" have been roundly condemned by human rights groups.

The Blackwater connection has come to light because of a plane spotted landing in the UK this past weekend. Inside the supposedly civilian plane were four armed US security policemen.

The Daily Mail reports:

[This] disclosure follows damning findings by the Council of Europe human rights organization, which accused Tony Blair on Friday of colluding in a CIA operation to run secret prisons in Poland and Romania by allowing the agency to use UK airports.

The study was contradicted on the same day by a report from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), which concluded that there was no evidence to support the claims.

But the director of the human rights group Liberty revealed that ACPO had admitted it restricted its inquiry to a review of media reports on the issue.

She accused them of rushing out their 'cursory' findings as part of a politically-motivated 'spin' operation.

The US plane's arrival was also logged by Touchdown News, a group of enthusiasts who record the movements of military aircraft at RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath.

The group said the plane used its civilian call sign when talking to air traffic control and took off again early on the morning of Sunday June 3, flying east.

The plane was linked to Blackwater because of its registration number, which had been placed on a list of flights to monitored by the European Parliament committee. The plane is officially registered to two Blackwater subsidiaries. Tracking technology has found that at least twice in the last year this particular plane flew to Camp Peary, the U.S. naval reservation in Virginia known as "The Farm". The Farm is believed to be a CIA training facility.