On Friday, Italian authorities issued arrest warrants against 13 American intelligence operatives, charging them with abducting a Muslim cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar), and rendering him to Egypt for torture.
The case is more than a little strange and complicated, as Salon's coverage of US papers today indicates:
The Italian arrest warrants contain a wealth of detail: According to eyewitness accounts, the radical imam was approached on his way to mosque by two men who sprayed him in the face with chemicals and then bundled him into an unmarked van. The agents didn't hide their tracks very thoroughly—while all but a few used apparent cover names, investigators were able to put together a detailed account of the operation by examining hotel registries, rental-car receipts, and cell-phone calls made in the area at the time, including some to CIA headquarters.The case is reminiscent of other CIA rendering cases including the all-but-forgotten Khaled el-Masri and Australia's Mamdouh Habib. Hard to see how Rumsfeld will be able to blame this pattern of state-sponsored abuse on a few bad apples.
The NYT and LAT say it's unclear whether the Italians knew about the operation beforehand, but the WP and Boston Globe say the Italian antiterror squad was taken by surprise. ''By kidnapping him [the Americans] interrupted an investigation already taking place by the Italian police," an anonymous official told the Globe. ''We had already been tapping his conversations. We had information on his friends and his links." Interestingly, the WP quotes a former CIA counterterrorism official who doubts it was a CIA operation. "The agency might be sloppy, but not that sloppy," he said. "There is no way they would sanction a kidnapping on Italian soil."
Your intel budget hard at work ... After noting that Italian investigators raided one operative's Italian "villa" for evidence, the NYT says that, according to the warrant, the spooks stayed in five-star hotels for the week of the abduction, amassing $144,984 in charges.
Even weirder: Part of the rendition then took place on a Gulfstream IV executive jet belonging to a part owner of the Boston Red Sox, who admitted to the Globe in March that he regularly leases it to the CIA—with the team logo covered up, of course.
Meanwhile, what if you invaded a few countries to build oil pipelines for Unocal, only to have the Chinese come along and buy the company??? I bet the neo-cons never saw that one coming...
And still on the DSM, Kerry and other Democrats are calling for more info from the Senate Intelligence Committee asap.
1 comment:
Condi says that the US is going to reverse umpteen years of dictator friendly status-quo-ism, but with its globalised 'rendition' progrom so active how is can they even work with themselves?
With integrity, that is.
And we Aussies all know that if people like Mamdoob Habib is an example of the terrifying ''jihadists" that the US are netting in this progrom, then US taxpayers should be looking closely at the money they are spending on this part of the so called WoT. 'Cos its a blatant rip-off!
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