CIA Aircraft Shell Companies; FAA notices 119,000 unregistered aircraft for epic drugflight lols; Afghan drug informant/patsy blamed; Evergreen Dispersant Chemtrails; DEA rents plane from drug traffickers for total win in Fake War on Drugs Submitted by HongPong on Mon, 2010-12-13 09:03 via Evergreen B747 Supertanker™ : The World’s Fastest, Largest Aerial Firefighting And Multi-Use Application Vehicle Going back to 2005:C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights - New York Times While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees. Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world. An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft. The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation. ....[the Masri rendition flight] ... episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on C.I.A. flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Mr. Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the C.I.A.-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Mr. Masri's passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp. Son of Air America: Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated air "proprietary," as agency-controlled companies are called. Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by corporate records. .......As the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation Administration's online registry. So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers' offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee. No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon, in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as 1949. Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such name on more than one company was "bad tradecraft: you shouldn't allow an element of one entity to lead to others." The Fake War On Drugs - exhibit 12245-12831221: Propping Up a Drug Lord, Then Arresting Him - NYTimes.com WASHINGTON — When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons. But what the government did not say was that Mr. Juma Khan was also a longtime American informer, who provided information about the Taliban, Afghan corruption and other drug traffickers. Central Intelligence Agency officers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents relied on him as a valued source for years, even as he was building one of Afghanistan’s biggest drug operations after the United States-led invasion of the country, according to current and former American officials. Along the way, he was also paid a large amount of cash by the United States. Meanwhile the Federal Aviation Administration concedes that its recordkeeping on more than a hundred thousand aircraft is totally hosed. This is amusing because the FAA was from the beginning set up this way to enable the rich and powerful to use small aircraft for protected criminal conspiracies. It has always been trivial for them to use shell companies and various dead-end forms of paperwork magic to hide direct ownership of drug trafficking planes. A state employee spelled a lot of this out for me, as if it were almost common knowledge. Evergreen, Polar Air Cross, Air America, Civil Air Transport, the Flying Tigers, L3, Titan, Skyway Aircraft, Vortex, these are just a few of the classics from then and now. AIG had tons of aircraft and got its start by insuring drug planes around Asia quite a bit. Contractors are allowed to import as much drugz as they want, and they are able to routinely use special bypasses inside airports. For example Evergreen was frequently able to get the keys to the 'sterile corridors' at JFK Airport which let them circumvent Customs. These kinds of criminal conspiracies are what the National Security Act of 1947 is all about. Let's have some lulz: The Associated Press: US senator calls for hearings on plane registry NEW YORK (AP) — The chairman of the Senate subcommittee overseeing aviation said Friday he would recommend holding congressional hearings on aircraft registration after The Associated Press reported the Federal Aviation Administration was missing data on one-third of U.S. planes. "We need to find out why, and how it can be brought back to have a registry that has credibility," said North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, a Democrat. The FAA says as many as 119,000 of the 357,000 U.S.-registered aircraft have "questionable registration" due to missing paperwork, invalid addresses and other paperwork problems. In reports in 2007 and 2008, the agency warned that the gaps were causing loopholes that terrorists, drug traffickers and other criminals might exploit. Law enforcement agencies were increasingly turning to the FAA for information, and the registry needed more accuracy as the government launched new computer systems to track suspicious flights, it said. On Friday the FAA said it was taking "proactive steps" to clean up the database by requiring all aircraft owners to re- register their planes over the next three years. "The agency is moving to a mandatory re-registration system like the ones most states use to register automobiles, so we have more current and complete registration information in our database," the agency said. Dorgan's counterpart in the House of Representatives, Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Ill., said Friday the FAA needs to improve its recordkeeping but stopped short of calling for hearings. "Given the security issues at stake, revising and modernizing the registration process is necessary," Costello said in a written statement. "The FAA needs to ensure the re-registration process runs as smoothly as possible and that the maintenance of records is improved, and I believe the FAA is proceeding accordingly." Both congressmen will soon be stepping down from their leadership roles in the aviation committees. Dorgan is retiring in January, and Senate leaders have not yet chosen a new committee chair. Costello, a Democrat, will lose the post when Republicans take control of the House in January. His likely replacement, Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wis., was unavailable for comment on Friday, a spokeswoman said. Until now, aircraft owners were only required to register once, when they purchased an aircraft. Errors accumulated over decades as new purchasers forgot to register, owners died, invalid addresses went uncorrected and junked aircraft went unreported, the FAA says. In addition to law enforcement purposes, the FAA said it uses the database to contact owners about safety problems and locate planes that go missing. Pilot groups said the outdated registry was not a security risk, noting the United States has other safeguards against terrorism. The Transportation Security Administration does background checks on student pilots from other countries, air traffic controllers watch for suspicious flights, and the Department of Homeland Security has launched new computer systems to screen aircraft arriving from other countries.