WP,pg1: CIA Ruse Is Said to Have Damaged Milan Probe (Italy Misled by CIA)

CIA Ruse Is Said to Have Damaged Probe in Milan
Italy Allegedly Misled on Cleric's Abduction
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 6, 2005; Page A01


MILAN -- In March 2003, the Italian national anti-terrorism police received an urgent message from the CIA about a radical Islamic cleric who had mysteriously vanished from Milan a few weeks before. The CIA reported that it had reliable information that the cleric, the target of an Italian criminal investigation, had fled to an unknown location in the Balkans.

In fact, according to Italian court documents and interviews with investigators, the CIA's tip was a deliberate lie, part of a ruse designed to stymie efforts by the Italian anti-terrorism police to track down the cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian refugee known as Abu Omar.

The strategy worked for more than a year until Italian investigators learned that Nasr had not gone to the Balkans after all. Instead, prosecutors here have charged, he was abducted off a street in Milan by a team of CIA operatives who took him to two U.S. military bases in succession and then flew him to Egypt, where he was interrogated and allegedly tortured by Egyptian security agents before being released to house arrest.

Italian judicial authorities publicly disclosed the CIA operation in the spring. But a review of recently filed court documents and interviews in Milan offer fresh details about how the CIA allegedly spread disinformation to cover its tracks and how its actions in Milan disrupted and damaged a major Italian investigation.

"The kidnapping of Abu Omar was not only a serious crime against Italian sovereignty and human rights, but it also seriously damaged counterterrorism efforts in Italy and Europe," said Armando Spataro, the lead prosecutor in Milan. "In fact, if Abu Omar had not been kidnapped, he would now be in prison, subject to a regular trial, and we would have probably identified his other accomplices."...


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/04/AR2005120400885.html

Interesting that we can kidnap people in foreign friendly countries and do with them what we please. Doesn't the CIA work for the President? This story was written by Dana Priest, she comes up with some good ones.

Edit; Actually Dana Priest was a contributor to this article.

as you say, and the headline doesn't begin to tell it.

Thanks for posting this very important article!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120501615.html

excerpt:

Ms. Rice said, "It is also U.S. policy that authorized interrogation will be consistent with U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture, which prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." What she didn't explain is that, under this administration's eccentric definition of "U.S. obligations," cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is not prohibited as long as it does not occur on U.S. territory. That is the reason for the secret prisons that the CIA has established in European countries and other locations around the world, and for the "renditions" of detainees to countries such as Egypt and Jordan: so that the administration can violate the very treaty Ms. Rice claims it is upholding.

<snip>

The only way to remedy the damage is to change the underlying policies. Such a change would help rather than hurt the fight against terrorism. By now the administration should recognize that, whether or not its abductions of terrorist suspects from European countries have been legal or justified, they have surely been counterproductive: The blowback against questionable renditions from Italy, Sweden and Germany has damaged the ability of those countries to support future collaboration with the CIA. If CIA prisoners are still being held in Europe, they probably won't be staying much longer; Washington's Eastern European friends stand to suffer severe censure from the European Union.

...more...

I no longer recognize my own country.
WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO US? HOW DARE THEY? To hell with all of them. The sooner the better.

...was responsible for this incident. The Washington Post has been blaming that CIA for various things since the Watergate era. How better to cover for a NeoCon intell group close to the Pentagon than to try to pin the blame on the CIA.

I really don't know much about the NSA, DIA, ONI, etc., and I think this is intentional. Isn't the NSA even bigger and more covert than the CIA? Would really appreciate a thread on this topic.

It had to be bad intelligence, misinterpreted, mistaken, or erroneous, because our government would never deliberately lie.

:sarcasm:

apprehension, and prosecution of numerous alleged terrorists, by more objective third party governments, and is hiding many of these alleged terroists away in secret prisons, or prisons where access to third parties is virtually impossible (like Guantanamo).

I have been wondering lately WHY they are doing this. Who ARE these people that they are imprisoning or "rendering," and torturing, in secret? For one thing, it seems that a number of innocents have been caught in this horrid net, and that the purpose of the imprisonment and torture is to terrorize and humiliate the Islamic world in general, and any who would oppose the Bush Cartel. Their apprehension and torture seems to have no other point.

Another reason for jailing and torturing innocents would be to force confessions, but no confessions have been forthcoming, no show trials, not propaganda value to the Bushites.

So, we have the innocents, on the one hand--who may have done absolutely nothing, not even carried a rifle in Afghanistan. We are beginning to find out more about them--because of the publicity around Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and the UK demanding and getting release of their own.

But, besides the innocents, the darkest of these dark prisoners--the ones sent to the secret prisons in Europe, or "rendered" to other countries that have reputations for torture--simply go totally unidentified, and are totally without rights or recourse. Are they even terrorists? Are they even Islamic/Arabs?

Or, could they be, a) in some way involved in Cheney arms dealing or other dirty dealing around the world, or in Bushite efforts to plant WMDs in Iraq after the invasion (or the foiling of such an effort); b) witnesses who know about Bush Cartel funding of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda; c) know something about how 9/11 was orchestrated and funded; d) participated in outsourced tweaking of the electronic voting machines in 2004; e) enemies of Ahmad Chalabi, or Manucher Ghorbanifar, or Chevron, or Orrin Hatch; f) fill in the blank.

Torture can have many uses, to the thieves, murderers, and arms and drugs dealers in the Bush Cartel, and to corporate war profiteers. None of them has any interest in the security of the people of the United States. None whatsoever. (I am quite convinced of that.) So, who are these prisoners?

-------------

NONE of the Bush Cartel prisoners, secret or otherwise, has ANY rights whatsoever. None are considered "innocent until proven guilty." None have access to our courts, or to anything resembling a real court. All access to them is restricted, including that of their assigned lawyers. They are fair game for both random and focused torture. They are extremely vulnerable to going mad, with indefinite detention, and would be quite useless as legal witnesses to anything, and would be unprosecutable in any real court of law, after such treatment. And that's the known prisoners. The others are in a dark dungeon somewhere, 'disappeared' from the world, as animals to be tormented and killed at the will of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their cohorts.

To say that this is disgraceful and appalling...is just not enough. Our "president" is now no better than Pinochet, or Milosevik, or Stalin, or Hitler. 'Disappearing" people. Torturing people. Whisking them away in "black" flights to nowhere.

The only good thing I can think of right now is that it's so bad, so disgusting and so appalling, that it might help us throw off our Corporate Rulers, once and for all, in one fell swoop--the whole, rotten, corrupt, devious, thieving, murderous, fascist lot of them, who have been scheming against us, and robbing us, and destroying our democracy, since Reagan. The military contractors. The banks. The news monopolies. The bought and paid for politicians. The Halliburton's. The Bechtel's. The Wal-Marts. The Diebold's. The rapers and pillagers of our planet. The lot of them.

This is what Corporate Rule hath wrought. Time to throw them all off, the scumsucking parasites of the world.

On the bright side, things do seem to be changing (ever so slowly).

The administration has been engaged in these activities since they were in office, but now the MSM is starting to expose them, and Rice had to make a trip to Europe to try to "explain" these criminal actions.

There was a great discussion of all this yesterday on Democracy Now!:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/05/1455239

Thanks for posting this incredible story (considering that it was in the WP)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/04/AR2005120400885.html

<snip>The case marks the first time that a foreign government has filed criminal charges against U.S. operatives for their role in a counterterrorism mission. In addition to jolting relations between the United States and Italy, normally a strong ally of Washington in the fight against terrorism, the case is fueling a growing chorus of European complaints that the Bush administration has crossed legal and ethical lines in dealing with Islamic extremists.

As investigators in Milan gradually unravel what happened to Nasr, 42, who remains in custody in Egypt, disclosures about the covert operation are causing political problems for both the U.S. and Italian governments.

Italian officials have firmly denied playing any role in the abduction or knowing about it beforehand. But current and former U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the operation, said the CIA briefed its counterparts at the Italian military intelligence agency ahead of time.

After the case became public, CIA officers involved in the decision to apprehend Nasr told their superiors that the Italian intelligence agency cleared the operation with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. But there appears to be no documentation that would support the claim that he was aware of the case should a public dispute erupt between Italy and the United States, according to two U.S. sources.

it seems that in this case, and probably others, the U.S. messed up. It worries me that the Bush administration's inability to do much of anything right most surely extends to issues of national, and international, security, such as this.