Prestwick’s reliance on US puts rendition in the spotlight

The number of US military flights using the Ayrshire hub raises uncomfortable questions, writes Martyn Mclaughlin

In an unpredictable year, there is something comfortingly familiar in the news that the UK government has refused to help Scottish authorities investigate the alleged use of Scottish airports in the CIA’S extraordinary rendition programme.

The smokescreen surrounding an unredacted US Senate report into the CIA’S alleged torture of terror suspects – and the use of international hubs to facilitate it – grows more impenetrable by the year.

With Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, refusing to assist Police Scotland’s investigation by providing access to the full report, that is not going to change any time soon. But it should not end scrutiny of the matter.

If you are under the impression that this is a historic issue which ceased to be relevant come the end of the George W Bush administration, congratulations on holding on to a degree of optimism in the year that is 2020.

Scottish airports, ideally positioned on the so-called Great Circle Route spanning North America and the Middle East, have been strategically significant to the US Armed Forces since the 1930s, and that has not suddenly changed.

Indeed, if anything, Scottish hubs appear to have become even more important to the world’s largest military of late. Thanks to refuelling records we know that Glasgow Prestwick Airport – one of the key hubs at the centre of the rendition flight allegations – has become one of the key stopover points for US military flights in recent years.

In fact, since the struggling hub was taken into public ownership by the Scottish Government, its primary revenue stream has been the Defense Logistics Agency, a Virginia-based body which manages the global supply chain for the US Army, Navy, and Air Force.

In the past five years, Prestwick has benefited from a significant upsurge in this US military custom. While there were just 95 refuelling stops made at the hub in 2015, the figure rose to 145 the following year. By the time Mr Trump was installed in the White House, the number rose to 180 in 2017, before jumping in 257 in 2018. The latest information, provided by the US Air Force, shows that in the first eight months of last year, a new record of 259 stops had been made.

There is nothing to indicate that this trend has been interrupted. Indeed, contacts in Ayrshire have suggested to me that the influx of US military flights is one of the few areas of Prestwick’s beleaguered business strategy that has been unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is what Michael Matheson referred to in Holyrood earlier this month as “strong performance across its niche areas of the aviation market”. It is for others to judge the transport secretary’s talents, but no one can dispute that his gift for euphemisms is unrivalled.

That may be positive news for Transport Scotland and the management team at Prestwick tasked with returning the airport to the private sector, but it cannot help but raise questions about the nature of the flights passing through Prestwick.

If there were widespread concerns about the foreign policies of the Bush administration, they appear trifling compared to how the US has regressed under Mr Trump’s watch. This is a president who has bluntly announced that “torture works” and advocated both a return to harsh interrogation techniques, and the use of so-called CIA "black sites”.