A FORMER senior CIA officer has condemned the practice of shuttling detainees from the war on terror to interrogation and torture facilities in the Middle East on flights, some of which pass through Scottish airports.

Robert Baer, one of the CIA's top operatives in the Middle East over the past 25 years, says that if the flights, known as the Guantanamo Express, prove to be carrying detainees, "Britain has the right to intervene . . .

and refuse those flights".

The Gulfstream V and Boeing 737, owned by a CIA front company, have landed at both Prestwick and Glasgow airports on several occasions shuttling to Dulles airport, Washington. The Gulfstream V, former registration N379P later changing to N8068V, has landed on at least 20 occasions since early 2002.

Both aircraft are understood to have been carrying out what the US intelligence service calls "rendition flights."

This is a controversial practice condemned by human rights activists, where prisoners are often snatched in one country and transported to another where they may be tortured contrary to international law, in an attempt to gain information useful in the war against terrorism.

"They are picking up people really with nothing against them, hoping to catch someone because they have no information about these [terrorist] networks, " says Baer.

The prisoner transfers were first reported by Sweden's TV 4 channel last year, when it described how CIA agents arrived in Stockholm on the Gulfstream V to take two suspected terrorists to Egypt.

"The more evidence that comes out, the clearer it is that there's been a stunning failure of accountability, " says lawyer John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

Baer spent most of his career running agents in the cities of the Middle East before becoming disillusioned with what he saw as political interference.

Explaining how "rendition" absolves the US authorities of responsibility, Baer adds: "It seems OK to arrest someone in say Sweden then send them to Egypt, and say you will ask the Egyptians if they are going to torture them. The Egyptians are of course going to say no, so this is all within the framework of Egyptian law."

In the past six weeks the Boeing 737 with the original registration N313P has passed through Glasgow at least twice.

"It was en route last time to a military base in Libya, " said one unnamed source within the aviation industry.

On another occasion the plane landed en route to Baghdad, but has also visited Afghanistan and Algeria.