US Company that Smuggled Weapons into Venezuela Is Linked to CIA ‘Black Site’ Renditions
GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA – Two executives at the company that chartered the U.S. plane that was caught smuggling weapons into Venezuela last week have been tied to an air cargo company that aided the CIA in the rendition of alleged terrorists to “black site” centers for interrogation. The troubling revelation comes as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has rejected a U.S. “humanitarian aid” convoy over concerns that it could contain weapons meant to arm the country’s U.S.-backed opposition.
Last Tuesday, Venezuelan authorities announced
that 19 rifles, 118 ammo magazines, 90 radios and six iPhones had been
smuggled into the country via a U.S. plane that had originated in Miami.
The authorities blamed the United States government for the illicit
cargo, accusing it of seeking to arm U.S.-funded opposition groups in
the country in order to topple the current Maduro-led government.
A subsequent investigation into the plane responsible for the weapons caché conducted by McClatchyDC
received very little media attention despite the fact that it uncovered
information clearly showing that the plane responsible for the shipment
had been making an unusually high number of trips to Venezuela and
neighboring Colombia over the past few weeks.
Steffan Watkins, an Ottawa-based analyst, told McClatchy in a telephone interview that the plane, which is operated by U.S. air cargo company 21 Air,
had been “flying between Philadelphia and Miami and all over the place,
but all continental U.S.” during all of last year. However, Watkins
noted that “all of a sudden in January, things changed” when the plane
began making trips to Colombia and Venezuela on a daily basis, sometimes
multiple times a day.
According to Watkins’ analysis, this
single plane had conducted 40 round-trip flights from Miami
International Airport to Caracas and Valencia — where the smuggled
weapons had been discovered — in Venezuela, as well as to Bogota and
Medellin in Colombia in just the past month.
Publicly available flight radar information
shows that the plane, although it has not returned to Venezuela since
the discovery of its illicit cargo, has continued to travel to Medellin,
Colombia, as recently as this past Monday.
Multiple CIA ties
In addition to the dramatic and
abrupt change in flight patterns that occurred just weeks before U.S.
Vice President Mike Pence prompted Venezuelan opposition member Juan
Guaidó to declare himself “interim president,” a subsequent McClatchy follow-up investigation
also uncovered the fact that two top executives at the company that
owns the plane in question had previously worked with a company
connected to controversial CIA “black sites.”
Indeed, the chairman and majority
owner of 21 Air, Adolfo Moreno, and 21 Air’s director of quality
control, Michael Steinke, both have “either coincidental or direct ties”
to Gemini Air Cargo, a company previously named by
Amnesty International as one of the air charter services involved in a
CIA rendition program. In this CIA program, individuals suspected of
terrorism were abducted by the intelligence agency and then taken abroad
to third-country secret “black sites” where torture, officially termed
“enhanced interrogation,” was regularly performed.
