Link US Torture Flights, Red Sox

Yes, I would make this up. No, I didn't. From Knight-Ridder Tribune Newspapers, via Common Dreams:

(KRT) - Last June, the Boston Red Sox chartered an executive jet to help their manager make a quick visit home in the midst of the team's championship season.

But what was the very same Gulfstream - owned by one of the Red Sox's partners, but presumably without the team's logo on its fuselage - doing in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003?

Perhaps by coincidence, Feb. 18, 2003, was the day an Islamic preacher known as Abu Omar, who had been abducted in Italy the previous day and forced aboard a small plane, also arrived at the Cairo airport.

Omar, whose given name is Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, was imprisoned by the Egyptians and, he claims, brutally tortured...

And:

Between June 2002 and January of this year, the Gulfstream made 51 visits to Guantanamo, Cuba, site of the U.S. naval base where more than 500 terrorism suspects are behind bars.

During the same period, the plane recorded 82 visits to Washington's Dulles International Airport as well as landings at Andrews Air Force Base outside the capital and the U.S. air bases at Ramstein and Rhein-Main in Germany.

The plane's flight log also shows visits to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.

Egypt, Afghanistan, Jordan and Morocco are among the countries to which the United States is known to have "rendered" terrorism suspects. Under the increasingly controversial practice of "rendition," terrorism suspects arrested abroad have been forcibly returned to their native countries for interrogation, sometimes with methods that are precluded by U.S. law.

Time to hate the Red Sox again.
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Update:

BRADENTON, Fla. -- 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.

Boston Globe.

Come back, Yankees. All is forgiven.