Here’s Your Baseball Scandal

WTF?:

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. The public prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, who is investigating Omar’s apparent kidnapping, expects to file charges within a few days, according to an Italian official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Spataro made headlines last month when, attempting to identify the plane that transported Omar from Italy to Egypt, he served a warrant on the Italian commander of the air base at Aviano, Italy, which is home to the U.S. Air Force’s 31st Fighter Wing.

Spataro declines to say whether the Gulfstream that landed in Cairo, which bore the tail number N85VM, departed from Aviano around the time of Omar’s disappearance.

But Federal Aviation Administration records obtained by the Tribune show that Gulfstream N85VM has been many places around the world that the Red Sox have almost certainly never gone.

Between June 2002 and January of this year, the Gulfstream made 51 visits to Guantanamo Bay, 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, Md., 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.

In case you are wondering, this isn’t the same plane that was offered to John Kerry’s legal team on election night. This plane is owned by another Red Sox partner named Philip H. Morse. Morse, the wealthy former owner of a catheter company, is listed as the sole officer and director of a company called Assembly Point which Dun and Bradstreet describes as a “religious organization” that is somehow involved with “churches, temples and shrines.”

Now this seems like it would be a good topic on which the congress could hold fruitful “baseball” hearings. They could call Curt “Bush shill” Schilling in just for fun and harrass him about whether he knows anything about his pals in the Bush administration using one of the Red Sox owners’ private planes to transport suspects to countries where they can be tortured with impunity. And if he refuses to appear maybe the committee could charter the plane to take him to one of those countries that have been so helpful to us to see if he changes his mind.

This is another of those juicy stories that just eludes the mainstream media. I know they write a story or two here and there. But, it never gets the kind of attention that these right wing soap operas get.

Let’s look at the nut here. The US government appears to be using one of the world series winning Boston Red Sox’s jet to kidnap and transport suspected terrorists all over the world to be tortured.

This isn’t a big story. Scott Peterson, however, is. Problem #7,556 with the corporate media.

Hat tip to samela

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