Italy—CIA Agents Wanted (Transcript) Originally broadcast June 30, 2005
Listen to Doug Cassel's Commentary
Rarely do CIA agents face criminal charges for their covert operations. But last week an Italian magistrate in Milan issued arrest warrants for at least thirteen apparent CIA operatives for their role two years ago in spiriting a suspected terrorist out of Italy to Egypt where, not surprisingly, he was apparently tortured.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the Italian prosecutor is preparing to ask the United States to extradite the suspects for trial.
While the facts are not yet fully clear, there is reason to believe that CIA agents may have participated in kidnapping, forced disappearance, and conspiracy to torture an individual.
Granted, the victim is no angel. For a year before he was snatched, Italian anti-terrorist police wiretapped the phone and bugged the Mosque where Imam Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, allegedly recruited suicide bombers. He probably would have been arrested and prosecuted sooner, if not for the value of the intelligence information he was unknowingly providing to police.
But in February 2003, to the surprise of the police, Abu Omar suddenly vanished. For over a year his family knew nothing of his whereabouts. Finally, he phoned his wife from Egypt. Unaware that his phone was still tapped by police, he told her he had been taken to Egypt, interrogated and tortured, but released. (He was then rearrested in Egypt and has not been heard from since.)
Reconstructing events, Milan police and prosecutors traced hotel and cell phone records to discover a squad of Americans who arrived in Milan shortly before Abu Omar disappeared, and who left shortly afterward. Nearly all used false names and phony passports. While in Italy they placed calls to the American Embassy and consulate. They also called CIA agents known by police to pose as diplomats, as well as an apparent CIA front company in northern Virginia.
On the day Abu Omar disappeared, the trail of their cell phone calls led to a joint American Italian air base north of Venice. Flight records show an executive jet—the kind the CIA uses for such operations—leaving the base, en route to an American air base in Germany, and from there to Egypt.
The evidence meticulously compiled by the Italian prosecutor and reported by the Tribune (along with the New York Times) leaves little doubt that this was a CIA “extraordinary rendition”—the apprehension of a suspect who is then sent for interrogation to a country such as Egypt known to use torture.
Normally, however, extraordinary renditions are done in cooperation with local law enforcement. Typically local police arrest the suspect and then turn him over to the Americans. What makes Abu Omar’s case different is that he was nabbed without the knowledge of local police and prosecutors.
But by whom? Could it be that Italian intelligence agencies (as opposed to local police) were unaware of the CIA operation on their territory? Is it likely that the CIA—whose modus operandi in other publicly known cases involves local partners—would choose to bypass the Italians?
That seems unlikely. In addition, witnesses report that some of the men who grabbed Abu Omar off the street and shoved him into a van spoke Italian and wore Italian police uniforms. And the air base from which he was flown out of Italy is under joint command and has an Italian commander.
The silence of the government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is also notable. Despite loud requests from some members of parliament, Rome has yet to clarify whether it knew of or authorized the operation.
Even if it did, that would not make it legal. Causing an individual to be disappeared for over a year and knowingly sending him to a country where torture is probable violate both international human rights and criminal laws. If the facts are as they appear, CIA agents may have committed serious crimes.
Still, the chances they will ever face the music in Milan are minimal. The mutual legal assistance treaty between Italy and the United States allows the U.S. to decline to provide assistance—such as supplying the real names of the suspects—on grounds of national security.
The extradition treaty has no explicit national security exception for those suspects whose real names are known. However, the government may argue that the two treaties must be read together—in pari materia—to allow the exception for both.
In any event one cannot imagine George Bush turning over CIA agents to another country to be prosecuted for what was clearly a CIA-authorized covert operation.
But then, who would have imagined that in the first years of the 21st century, forced disappearances and conspiracies to torture would be committed, not by third world thugs, but by the self-proclaimed defender of freedom? Is committing international crimes the sort of behavior for which Americans wish to be known? Or is breaking the law okay, as long as we don’t get caught?
Doug Cassel is Director of the Center for International Human Rights of Northwestern University School of Law.
Views expressed are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Northwestern University, the Center of International
Human Rights, or Chicago Public Radio.
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