-------------------------------------------------------- From: •••@••.••• Subject: Italy charges CIA agents --<downloaded>-- http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0506250082jun25,1,1654457.story?page=1&coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed Italy charges CIA agents In rare act by ally, officials seek arrests of U.S. agents in kidnapping of imam who allegedly was tortured in Egypt By John Crewdson, Tom Hundley and Liz Sly, Tribune correspondents. Tom Hundley reported from Milan, and Liz Sly from Rome Published June 25, 2005 WASHINGTON -- Four days before Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan vanished into the thin Italian air, three middle-aged American visitors checked into the $300-a-night Milan Hilton on Via Luigi Galvani. The Americans, a man and two women, might have been tourists or fashion buyers, the hotel's usual foreign clientele. The U.S. passports and visa cards, the driver's licenses, even the frequent-flyer IDs they presented to the desk clerk were genuine enough. Only the names on those documents were bogus. So was their shared corporate address, a non-existent company with a post office box in Washington. According to Italian authorities, there was a reason for all the cloak-and-dagger business: The three Americans really were spies, the last-arriving members of a covert action team assigned to snatch Hassan off the street and ship him back to Egypt, where he would later say he was brutally tortured. On Thursday an Italian judge issued arrest warrants charging two of the three Americans and 11 of their colleagues with illegally detaining Hassan, a fundamentalist Muslim preacher better known in Milan's Islamic community as Abu Omar. The move was no less extraordinary for coming from a country whose prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is one of the few European leaders who support the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq and which has contributed 3,000 troops to that effort. Current and retired CIA officers, none of whom agreed to be quoted by name, said they could not remember one of their own having been charged abroad with a crime other than espionage, and certainly not in a country friendly to the U.S. Although the CIA refuses to talk about the Milan abduction or even acknowledge that it occurred, documents obtained by the Tribune clearly link the intelligence agency with the identities, addresses and cell phones used by several of the American operatives. The existence of the CIA's supersecret abduction squads has come to light since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, although the agency's practice of snatching suspected criminals abroad goes back at least to the Reagan administration. Congressional Democrats have called for a public inquiry into the practice of covert abductions, which the CIA euphemistically terms "extraordinary rendition," and have introduced legislation that would ban what they term the "outsourcing of torture" to other countries such as Egypt. News reports and human-rights organizations have identified at least 33 suspected terrorists who have been "rendered" by the U.S. since Sept. 11. Unnamed intelligence officials have been quoted as putting the number over the past two decades at closer to 100. Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief, whose country has received more renditions than any other, recently told a group of Tribune reporters and editors that he was aware of "60 or 70" cases in which U.S. agents have seized Egyptian nationals abroad and flown them to Egypt. In most of the known renditions, suspects have been arrested by local authorities in such countries as Indonesia, Sweden and Macedonia before being handed over to the CIA. Even when such arrests are made purely at the behest of the U.S.--"there are arrests, and then there are arrests," a senior American intelligence official said with a laugh--they technically absolve the CIA of responsibility for unlawful seizure. In the case of Abu Omar, the absence of any prior arrest has left the CIA open to kidnapping charges. Indeed, the police in Milan, who had been tapping Abu Omar's telephone, were as surprised as his wife and friends by his sudden disappearance. When they learned he was gone, the puzzled police opened a missing-person investigation. The key sleuth Armando Spataro, the Milan prosecutor who requested the warrants, said the names of those accused, which have not been made public, were taken from the passports and other documents used at hotels and car rental agencies in Milan. None of the databases accessible by the Tribune contains any indication that individuals with those names have ever had a spouse, a residence, an employer, a driver's license, a telephone, a mortgage, a credit history or a family--in short, none of the things typically associated with real people. Spataro, who gained his reputation by prosecuting the Mafia in Italy, said in a telephone interview Friday that he believed most of the names were probably not the true identities of the accused kidnappers. --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/27/AR2005042701980.html washingtonpost.com Italy Opens Its Own Probe of Agent's Slaying in Iraq By Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, April 28, 2005; A17 ROME, April 27 -- Dissatisfied with the results of a joint investigation with the United States, Italy on Wednesday began its own probe into the March 4 killing of one of its intelligence agents by U.S. troops in Baghdad. Italian officials said Rome prosecutors were looking for evidence of homicide in the case of Nicola Calipari, who was transporting a rescued Italian hostage to the Baghdad airport when U.S. soldiers opened fire on their car. The bullet-scarred Toyota Corolla was brought to Rome on Tuesday. The prosecutors have demanded the names of the soldiers who were involved, but the Pentagon has denied the request, Italian officials said. The Italian move follows the release this week of partial findings from the joint American-Italian investigation. The Americans concluded that their soldiers were not at fault and had observed the proper rules of engagement for firing at a suspicious vehicle, according to unnamed Pentagon officials. Two Italian investigators who took part in the probe have so far refused to sign on to the findings. The controversy represents an unusual break between the Bush administration and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose chief aide, Gianni Letta, met with U.S. Ambassador Mel Sembler twice on Tuesday. Berlusconi has been one of Bush's most staunch European allies in Iraq, where Italy maintains about 3,000 troops. The killing of Calipari, who had aided in the release of journalist Giuliana Sgrena from kidnappers, shocked Italians. According to an account from Sgrena, who was wounded in the shooting, Calipari threw his body over hers to protect her from the hail of bullets. U.S. officials have said, however, that Calipari was partly at fault because he was traveling on a dangerous road at night and, they say, had not properly notified American officials of his plans. The dispute has put at stake the reputation of a man viewed here as a gallant hero. "The government of Italy does not want a fight with the U.S.A., but it can't commit suicide by putting full blame on a national hero," commentator Alessandro Politi wrote in Il Messaggero, a newspaper in Rome. The first findings from Italian investigators on Wednesday absolved Calipari of any "errors," an Italian official said. Italian investigators who are examining the car are trying to ascertain how many bullets struck it and from which direction. "The important thing is not what Calipari did but what the people who shot him did," the official said. Berlusconi had asked the United States for an admission of error but did not receive one. U.S. officials have contended from the beginning that, at most, the shooting was a tragic accident. The Italian government has avoided detailing just how Sgrena's release came about. Stories of a ransom payment abounded in the Italian press at the time, and some commentators have questioned the wisdom of rushing Sgrena to the airport. "In almost two months from that tragic night, we have not grasped an ounce of truth or fact," Giuseppe d'Avanzo wrote in La Repubblica, a newspaper that has been highly critical of Berlusconi. "It looks as if the love affair is over between Bush and Berlusconi," an Italian Foreign Ministry official said. "Berlusconi needed help, and the administration did not supply it. The Americans were not going to sacrifice the morale of their soldiers for Berlusconi." Shortly after the shooting, Berlusconi announced that he would begin to withdraw Italy's troops from Iraq in September. Berlusconi's popularity has plummeted in recent months, largely because of inflation and stagnation in the national economy. The Baghdad shooting took place about six weeks before regional government elections in which Berlusconi's coalition fared poorly. It is not clear whether Calipari's death contributed to Berlusconi's woes, but commentators have been quick to point out that the prime minister's closeness to Bush has all but lost its political usefulness. This week, Berlusconi reconfigured his cabinet to try to keep his coalition afloat and avoid early national elections. © 2005 The Washington Post Company -- ============================================================ If you find this material useful, you might want to check out our website (http://cyberjournal.org) or try out our low-traffic, moderated email list by sending a message to: •••@••.••• You are encouraged to forward any material from the lists or the website, provided it is for non-commercial use and you include the source and this disclaimer. Richard Moore (rkm) Wexford, Ireland blog: http://harmonization.blogspot.com/ "Escaping The Matrix - Global Transformation: WHY WE NEED IT, AND HOW WE CAN ACHIEVE IT ", old draft: http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/rkmGlblTrans.html _____________________________ "...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire." - Srdja Trifkovic There is not a problem with the system. The system is the problem. Faith in ourselves - not gods, ideologies, leaders, or programs. _____________________________ cj list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=cj newslog list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=newslog _____________________________ Informative links: http://www.indymedia.org/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/ http://www.greenleft.org.au/index.htm http://www.MiddleEast.org http://www.rachel.org http://www.truthout.org http://www.williambowles.info/monthly_index/ http://www.zmag.org http://www.co-intelligence.org ============================================================
