[These developments in Italy were front page news in the FT yesterday; they were literally a single paragraph in the World Briefs section in the NYT. Perpaps the NYT is right nothing will come of it. But there seems a fairly good chance (if Prodi's coalition stays in power) that this might come to a very public and embarrassing trial. It kind of shows you the good side of the independent magistrate tradition. I wonder what they'd dig up here if we had them.]
[Following the article is an enjoyably brisk and optimistic FT editoral from the same day.]
November 21 2006 Financial Times
Pressure grows on US rendition policy By Guy Dinmore
Secrets of the CIA "rendition" programme, exposed through overseas investigations and damaging legal cases, have prompted an internal review of the policy and methods used by the US to seize and interrogate terror suspects abroad.
Human rights organisations are also adding to pressure on the US over its detainee policy, demanding that Washington account for scores of "disappeared" people whose whereabouts are unknown.
This follows President George W. Bush's declaration on September 6 that the CIA had emptied its secret prisons and transferred their 14 inmates to Guantánamo for eventual trial.
US officials privately acknowledge that they are trying to minimise political fallout from renditions, just as the US has been forced to confront the issue of torture, secret prisons and detention without trial.
One of the most damaging cases to come to light is that of an Egyptian cleric who was snatched from the streets of Milan in 2003. Washington has failed to persuade the Italian government to throw a cloak of secrecy over the possible trial in absentia of 26 suspected US agents, including two CIA station chiefs, charged with his abduction.
Amnesty International has urged the Italian government to forward to the US extradition warrants for 26 Americans issued by a Milan court in July. Washington is putting pressure on Rome to stay its hand.
Prosecutors in Italy have yet to make a formal request for the case to go to trial. But yesterday, Nicolò Pollari, head of Sismi, the military intelligence service, was removed from office.
The cleric, Osama Hassan Mustafa Nasr, known as Abu Omar, had been under investigation by the Italian judiciary when the US got to him first. Allegedly with the help of top Sismi officials, he was driven to a US air base and then flown to Egypt via Germany. The cleric remains in Egyptian detention where, it is alleged, he has been tortured.
The State Department declined to discuss the subject: "We don't talk about the internal Italian judicial process. We don't talk about individual renditions."
Another victim of a CIA rendition, Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen, plans to make his first visit to the US this week for a landmark lawsuit launched on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU is charging former CIA director George Tenet, among others, with the unlawful abduction of Mr Masri in Macedonia in 2003. He says he was flown to Afghanistan and abused at a CIA-run secret facility there before being dumped in Albania five months later.
The ACLU is appealing before a Virginia court against the dismissal of its lawsuit by a federal district court earlier this year. The US government argued that hearing the case would jeopardise state secrets.
Mr Masri's case is also part of a German parliamentary inquiry into possible violations by the German intelligence community.
In addition, the US has had to deal with the case of a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who was seized by US authorities and deported to his native Syria, where he was tortured. Ottawa launched a formal protest and legal cases are pending.
In spite of denials by European governments of involvement in illegal abductions, Amnesty International has named seven governments that should be held to account for their part in renditions: Bosnia, Germany, Italy, Macedonia, Sweden, Turkey and the UK.
The US Congress, to be under Democratic control from January, is getting restive. Senator Carl Levin, the next head of the armed services committee, promises action on renditions.
"I'm not comfortable with the system," he told reporters. "I think that there's been some significant abuses which have not made us more secure but have made us less secure and have also, perhaps, cost us some real allies, as well as not producing useful information. So I think the system needs a thorough review."
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, says the Bush administration is not about to give up on renditions, but appears to have made some changes. For example, Uzbekistan and Russia have been taken off the list of countries that detainees could be sent to.
"Clearly they [the US] are chastened but they don't want to publicly admit they were wrong and won't do it again. They understand it is not good to be seen to be kidnapping," Mr Malinowski commented.
"Who has custody of them now?" he added, referring to the missing detainees. "We don't know what happened to these people. The bottom line is that they disappeared."
There are suspicions that allied Arab states - including Morocco, Jordan and Egypt - are "warehousing" detainees for the CIA.
One investigator, who asked not to be named, said there had been an internal CIA firestorm over the Italian case - not because of the possible violation of Italian law but because of the US agents' "total utter ineptitude".
They left a trail of names, bills and phone records that could later be traced by the Italian magistrates. "This set off a whole internal review," the investigator said. The CIA declined to comment.
A tour of Europe last December by Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, was dominated by emerging accounts of secret prisons and renditions. She repeatedly insisted that the US did not deliver prisoners to governments it believed would torture them.
She also reminded her hosts that if the US had carried out renditions on their territory it had been done with permission.
"It is up to those governments and their citizens to decide if they wish to work with us to prevent terrorist attacks against their own country or other countries, and decide how much sensitive information they can make public," she said.
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[FT Editorial Comment same day]
The curse of rendition
The decision yesterday by the government of Romano Prodi, the Italian prime minister, to sack his country's head of military intelligence and two other spy chiefs is yet another reminder of how leading European countries have colluded in the shameful and destructive practice of "rendition" - a programme run by the US Central Intelligence Agency to kidnap and transport beyond the reach of the law suspects in the "war on terror".
Prosecutors suspect Nicolò Pollari, head of Italy's Sismi agency, of involvement in the CIA's abduction in Milan of Osama Hassan Mustafa Nasr in February 2003. The radical Egyptian cleric was then flown to Cairo where he claims - credibly, given Egypt's human rights record - to have been tortured.
While there may well be other motives behind Rome's move - allegations that an associate of Mr Pollari attempted to smear Mr Prodi, fears for the safety of Italian troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon and a wish to embarrass Silvio Berlusconi, the previous Italian prime minister, are all adduced as possible reasons - this looks like a rare attempt to hold someone to account for "rendition".
The word itself - which ranks with euphemisms such as "friendly fire" or "collateral damage" - is perversely misleading. Behind its bogus legalism lies a practice of lawlessness, captured in chilling detail in a Council of Europe report last June, implicating more than a dozen European countries.
These countries, among them Britain, Germany, Spain, Poland, Sweden and Turkey, stand accused of complicity in kidnapping and the outsourcing of torture to friendly despots, at a network of secret sites for "ghost prisoners" denied legal process.
The unusual detail of the Council of Europe report and newspaper accounts provoked a storm of bluster and obfuscation, masking panic at the leakiness of the intelligence services that provided most of the information and a determination to shoot the messenger rather than heed the message.
The message could not be clearer. It is a capitulation by liberal societies to their enemies, a surrender of the rule of law to jihadi totalitarianism, to sink into such practices - whatever semantic evasions are used to describe them. As the Financial Times has persistently argued: we should not need to make the case against torture. It is morally depraved. It corrodes the society that condones it. It elicits largely worthless information. Full stop.
It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which policies such as "rendition" and the abuses practised at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have handed propaganda triumphs to the jihadis - harder still to undo the damage to US and western reputations. A start might be made if those high up the chain of command - such as Donald Rumsfeld, the now defenestrated US defence secretary - were called to account for their actions. Italy may have started this process.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006