Adam Zagorin, a former TIME correspondent who has covered the dark corners of the post-9/11 world, is asking that question because that’s the name behind more than a dozen U.S. extraordinary renditions — seizing suspected terrorists around the world and flying them where they could be encouraged to tell what they knew. Yet while the name remains the same, the signatures vary widely. Zagorin, following up on his initial post earlier this week on fresh documents that pull back, just a little bit, of the heavy cloak surrounding the rendition program, writes:
Now it turns out that a State Department officer supposedly named “Terry A. Hogan” wrote at least seventeen letters on official letterhead informing foreign authorities that the rendition flights and “accompanying personnel are under contract to the US government.” The letters describe the flights as “Global Support to US Embassies worldwide,” an apparent falsehood that gave plane crews cover in airports from Europe to the Middle East, also permitting greater latitude in their flight plans.