Doug Lorimer
On July 4, right-wing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a staunch supporter of Washington's global "war on terror", announced that at an hour-long meeting with the US ambassador he had demanded that the US government show "full respect for Italian sovereignty". Berlusconi's demand followed the issuing by Italian judge Guido Salvini on June 22 of arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents on charges of having kidnapped a Muslim cleric in Milan two years ago.
The warrants, requested by the anti-terrorist division of the Italian prosecutor's office, relate to the disappearance on February 17, 2003 of 42-year-old Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Nasr had been granted refugee status by Italy, because he faced political persecution, and headed a mosque in Milan at the time of his disappearance.
According to the prosecutor's office and Milan police investigators, Nasr was seized by CIA agents as he was walking from his home to his mosque for noon prayers. The CIA agents forced Nasr into a van, drove him for several hours to the joint Italian-US military base at Aviano in northern Italy and then had him flown to Egypt via the US air base at Ramstein, Germany.
The Egyptian authorities have refused to provide Italian authorities with any information as to Nasr's current whereabouts. However, the July 3 Chicago Tribune reported that Nasr, who it noted had been "trained by the US to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan", was being held without charge at the Damanhour prison outside of Alexandria.
While Berlusconi's government has denied it had any involvement in or prior knowledge of Nasr's illegal abduction, the June 30 Washington Post reported that before the CIA kidnapped Nadr "the CIA station chief in Rome briefed and sought approval from his counterpart in Italy, according to three CIA veterans with knowledge of the operation and a fourth who reviewed the matter after it took place".
However, "another CIA officer who reviewed the operation after it took place said it was highly unusual because 'it should have been the head of service to the head of service' — meaning then-CIA director George J. Tenet speaking directly to his counterpart, Gen. Nicolo Pollari. 'There's none of that ... this is pretty abnormal'."
The Post also reported that US officials "involved in the Milan operation at the time said it was conceived by the Rome CIA station chief, organised by the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, and approved by the CIA leadership and by at least one person at the National Security Council. The station chief has since retired but remains undercover."
Illegal abductions and secret transfers of "terrorism suspects" to foreign states for interrogation are an acknowledged tool of Washington's "war on terror". Former US intelligence officials have estimated that the CIA has carried out 100-150 such illegal abductions — officially called "extraordinary renditions" — since 9/11.
US President George Bush claimed in March that under Washington's policy of "extraordinary rendition" the CIA only delivers "terrorism suspects" to other countries once it has obtained assurances they will not be tortured. However, the Italian prosecutor's office told the Milan magistrate's court it had evidence that Nasr had suffered "physical violence" during his detention in Egypt.
Nasr was temporarily released from prison for medical reasons in April 2004. Before he disappeared again in Egypt in May 2004, Nasr telephoned his wife and another religious leader in Milan, Mohammed Reda, telling them he had been tortured with electric shocks during his detention.
The June 24 Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported that Reda testified to Italian authorities that Nasr had said that he was tortured after refusing to work in Italy as a CIA informer.
Reuters reported on June 24 that the documents presented by the Italian prosecutor's office to the Milan judge included wiretap transcripts of Nadr's phone conversations with Reda.
Furthermore, the June 23 Los Angeles Times reported that the CIA station chief in Milan at the time of Nasr's kidnapping — a 51-year-old Honduran-born US citizen who used a US diplomatic cover — "is believed to have accompanied or followed Abu Omar [Nasr] to Egypt and to have been present for some of the interrogations, a senior Italian judicial official said...
"That raises the possibility that the American agent was aware of the alleged torture, the Italian official said. The man's movements were traced by his use of a cellular [mobile] telephone to make calls from Egypt in the two weeks after the disappearance of Abu Omar, the official said."
The CIA's use of torture on abducted "terrorism suspects" — both by its own agents and by its foreign collaborators, particularly in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan — has been repeatedly reported by the US press. The February 14 New Yorker magazine, for example, carried a major article on the issue by Jane Mayer.
One of the earliest cases of CIA "rendering", Mayer reported, was the 1998 seizure in Albania of Shawki Salama Attiya and four other Egyptians, all of whom were sent to Egypt. "Attiya later alleged that he suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees."
Mayer interviewed Dan Coleman, a former FBI agent who worked with the CIA on terrorism-related cases. He said that, while the policy of rendition existed before 9/11, "afterward, it really went out of control".
Torture, Coleman said, "has become bureaucratised". This is confirmed by the fact that the torture techniques described by Attiya were the same as those applied in 2003 to large numbers of Iraqi detainees by US guards acting on instructions from CIA and US military interrogators at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.
About half-a-dozen US military personnel have been convicted or have entered guilty pleas in the widely publicised scandal at Abu Ghraib, but no high-ranking officials have been charged. To the contrary, as the June 30 New York Times reported: "The Pentagon has promoted or nominated for promotion two senior Army officers who oversaw or advised detention and interrogation operations in Iraq during the height of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal."
From Green Left Weekly, July 13, 2005.
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