Court case provides rendition details

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- Details of the CIA's rendition program became public because of a money dispute between two U.S. contractors involved in a flight to transport a terror suspect.

A British organization, Reprieve, discovered 1,500 pages of legal documents filed in Columbia County in upstate New York, The Washington Post reported. Reprieve alerted the Post and other news organizations to the information.

The legal dispute involved SportsFlight, a broker who contracted with the CIA to supply planes for the rendition program, in which terrorism suspects are sent to another country for interrogation, and Richmor Aviation, a company that arranges charters for planes owned by others, the Post said. In 2009, a judge ordered SportsFlight to pay Richmor more than $1 million.

The court documents detail a flight in a Gulfstream IV owned by Philip Morse, vice chairman of Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Boston Red Sox. The plane left Columbia County on Aug. 12, 2003, and returned four days later after a flight with stops that included Thailand, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan and Ireland and cost the CIA $339,228.05. During the flight, Riduan Isamuddin, an Indonesian terror suspect arrested in Thailand, was taken into U.S. custody, leading to three years in secret CIA prisons.

The documents also include phone logs of calls from the plane to CIA headquarters and a top CIA official, the Post said.