Who is Leonard T. Bayard?

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Torture Plan Spotted in FRA Frankfurt [Rhein-Main], Germany - 6-December-2003

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The Chicago Tribune has a fascinating article this week and that asks this question. According to the Tribune:

"The questions arise because the signature of a Leonard Thomas Bayard
appears on the annual report of a Portland-based company, Bayard
Foreign Marketing LLC, that was filed in August with the Oregon
secretary of state.

According to federal records, Bayard Foreign Marketing is the newest
owner of a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V executive jet reportedly used
since Sept. 11, 2001, to transport suspected Al Qaeda operatives to
countries such as Egypt and Syria, where some of them claim to have
later been tortured." The plane's registration number is N379P.

Though the Tribune tried to find information about Mr. Bayard, the
paper claims that "commercial databases turned up no information on
Leonard Thomas Bayard: no residence address, no telephone number."

He apparently worked for a firm that called itself Bayard Foreign
Marketing which claimed to have an office in a historic downtown
Portland office building known as the Pittock Block.

The telephone number on Bayard's annual report is listed to a private

residence in a rundown section of northeast Portland whose doorbell
went unanswered earlier this week.

The story also says that, " Scott Caplan, an attorney whose offices
occupy the same Portland suite as the one listed by Bayard Foreign
Marketing, identified Bayard as "a client" but declined to say more. "

In another strange twist the paper claims that, "The first public
mention of the Gulfstream appeared six weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, when
a Pakistani newspaper reported that Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a
27-year-old microbiology student at Karachi University, had been
spirited aboard the plane at Karachi's airport by Pakistani security
officers in the early hours of Oct. 23, 2001."

To make things even more bizarre, "An international network of "plane
spotters," hobbyists who log the comings and goings of specific
aircraft around the world, have posted on the Internet photographs of
the Gulfstream in various locations."

The story in its entirety can be seen here.