February 25, 2005 - It is called Bayard Foreign Marketing, LLC. Its address is in Portland, Oregon. It doesn’t seem to have an office. It is unclear what it is that the company markets or who owns it. It doesn’t have an office. It doesn’t have employees. It does have one tangible asset – a Gulfstream executive jet wearing N379P on its tail. Bayard Foreign Marketing LLC bought the jet last November. No body seems to know just who owns Bayard Foreign Marketing LLC.

But there is plenty known about the jet with N379P emblazoned on its tail. In November 2001 two Egyptian nationals, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery were plucked off the street, hustled aboard the jet at Bromma Airport, flown to Cairo and turned over to Egyptian intelligence authorities. Six months after 911 a Yemeni microbiology at Karachi University, Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed was put aboard that plane by Pakistani security forces. No one seems to know where Gulfstream N379P went to; just that it took off from Karachi with Mohammed aboard.

On February 13, 2003 Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan who is better known as Abu Omar disappeared off the streets of Milan, Italy. He was a veteran of the war against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan and fought against the Serbs in Bosnia. He was put aboard Gulfstream N379P at Aviano Air Base and flown to Cairo where he was turned over to the Egyptians. In April 2004 Omar telephoned his wife and told her that he had been kidnapped by US and Italian agents, drugged and taken to Egypt where he was imprisoned an tortured for 14 months. He told his wife that he had just been released from prison. A few weeks later Omar was arrested again and has not been heard from since. Milan’s chief prosecutor, Armando Spataro is investigating the kidnapping and says that cell phone records confirm telephone calls from the abductors to Aviano.

The Times of London has dug into the story of the mysterious Gulfstream. It is based at Dulles International Airport, far away from Portland, Oregon. The Times reports that Gulfstream N379P flight logs show trips to 49 destinations outside the US including Egypt, Guantanamo, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya, and Uzbekistan in the month of November 2004. For a company whose business doesn’t seem to exist except on paper it certainly seems quite busy.

You have to ask just what it is that Bayard Foreign Marketing, LLC is selling and to whom? That may just be a question to which you don’t really want to know the answer. If it is what it looks like on the surface the operations with which the airplane seems connected are in violation of the laws of several countries including our own. Milan’s Chief Prosecutor seems to be getting awfully close to that answer. If he digs it out it will land square in the lap of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who may have to rethink his famous torture memo.