Argentina wins alleged death flight extradition

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

May 6, 11:57 AM EDT
Argentina wins alleged death flight extradition
By MICHAEL WARREN
Associated Press Writer

http://hosted.ap.org.nyud.net:8090/photos/5/55e46151-e01c-4c95-8bc1-0a7de0e811dc-small.jpg

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) -- A pilot who allegedly flew death flights for Argentina's military dictatorship was extradited from Spain on Thursday.

Julio Alberto Poch is accused of illegal detentions, tortures, disappearances and deaths when he served as a military pilot during the 1976-1983 junta, which killed as many as 30,000 people.

Poch arrived in Buenos Aires Thursday and faces a court hearing Friday. He has denied the charges.

Poch, 57, was turned in by his own co-workers at the Dutch airline where he worked after the dictatorship. They said he had bragged about the death flights and was unrepentant about executing people he considered to be terrorists.


Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_ARGENTINA_DEATH_FLIGHTS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-05-06-11-57-10

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Argentina: Waves from the past
TIME Domestic
March 27, 1995 Volume 145, No. 13

A former naval officer confesses
to throwing prisoners into the ocean
during the dirty war
BY PAUL GRAY

"They were unconscious. we stripped them, and when the flight commander gave the order, we opened the door and threw them out, naked, one by one. That is the story, and nobody can deny it." With these words, former Argentine navy Captain Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, 48, spilled one of the dirtiest secrets of the "dirty war" that raged in his country from the mid-1970s through the early '80s. Human-rights workers and relatives of at least 9,000 Argentines who "disappeared" under military rule have long contended that the missing were systematically murdered by troops acting on orders from the ruling generals. But Scilingo is the first ex-officer to echo these charges in public.

Even Argentines inured to the perfidies of the dictatorial period were shocked by the confession that first appeared in El Vuelo (The Flight), a book based on a series of taped conversations with investigative reporter Horacio Verbitsky. Over the past two weeks, Scilingo has repeated his story in newspaper and television interviews. As a 28-year-old lieutenant, he was stationed in Buenos Aires at the Naval School of Mechanics in 1977; Scilingo says his post, already a notorious detention center for those rounded up on charges of disloyalty, soon became a way station to death.

For the next two years, he remembers, some 15 to 20 prisoners were trucked every Wednesday to the Buenos Aires airport, put on a military plane, and then dropped, drugged but alive, from a height of about 13,000 ft. into the Atlantic Ocean.

Scilingo estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 people "disappeared" in this manner from his base alone. He admits responsibility for 30 of them. He says he was ordered to participate in two of the death flights in 1977, adding that his fellow officers drew the same sort of assignment: "It was to give everyone a turn, a kind of Communion." On his first flight, Scilingo helped strip and then throw 13 victims out of a coast guard Sky Van; on his second, he did the same to 17 more out of a navy Elektra.

More:
http://www.yendor.com/vanished/junta/scilingo.html

[Liberation Angel]

1. My family lived in Argentina and this is critically important stuff BECAUSE of junta ties to Bush

The fact is that GHWBush was head of the CIA during this period which followed the earlier Bush prog4enitor's support for the Nazis who translocated to Argentina and produced the Peron regime.

The historical context is critical to understanding not only US history but the timelines of Naziism and Fascism and their ideologies and connections to US, Wall Street, the Bushes, Rockefellers, big oil, the nuclear industy etc.

These are fundamentally important stories which more folks at DU need to understand. My family was personally hurt by these bastards...

[troubledamerican]

3. Bush, Argentina, Underground Nazis

Jeb Bush & Argentina
http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-533-the-florida-argentine-connection-another-helluva-conspiracy-theory/

Check out footnote #25 here:
http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/repost-ftr-248-bushed-the-political-heritage-of-george-w-bush/

http://spitfirelist.com/news/half-century-later-a-new-look-at-argentine-nazi-ties/

Linking 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, Lockerbie, the 1993 WTC bombing, the AMIA bombing in Argentina and the Underground Reich.
http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-373-the-ties-that-bind-part-vi/

http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-131-the-loot-of-the-argentine-holocaust/

http://spitfirelist.com/books/the-nazis-go-underground/

[Judi Lynn]

4. Great links. Just saw your first, will read them all. People have been denied these facts

by our very own corporate media outlets, only learning about any of it YEARS after it happened, and then, only with a hard ((((( spin )))))).

Thanks for the material.

[Liberation Angel]

5. Thanks, awesome

more like this always helps get the info out

really grateful for it

LA

[troubledamerican]

6. MP3s of those topics exist under the "audio" section -- check them out.

[gratuitous]

2. Justice delayed 27 years

Will the United States have the courage to re-visit our very own junta years? Or are we satisfied with ordering other countries to come to terms with the atrocities of their past? We're special, you know.

[Judi Lynn]

7. 'Death flights' suspect returned to Argentina

'Death flights' suspect returned to Argentina
By the CNN Wire Staff
May 7, 2010 -- Updated 2107 GMT (0507 HKT)

CNN) -- An Argentine pilot accused of participating in "death flights" during the nation's "dirty war" in the 1970s and '80s has been extradited from Spain and will face charges Friday, the government's Judicial News Service reported.

Former Argentine Navy Lt. Julio Alberto Poch was arrested last year on charges that he was at the helm of aircraft from which 950 drugged and blindfolded prisoners were thrown alive during the 1976-83 right-wing dictatorship. Poch, a commercial pilot for the Dutch airline Transavia.com, was arrested September 23 when his flight made a stopover in Valencia.

He was wanted on an international arrest warrant and was returned to Argentina on Thursday.

As many as 30,000 people disappeared or were held in secret jails and torture centers during the dictatorship.

The prisoners included students, labor leaders, intellectuals and leftists who had run foul of the dictatorship because of their political views. Most were dragged off the street or otherwise summarily arrested and held without trial in secret prisons where many were tortured.

More:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/07/argentina.death.flight.pilot/index.html