Rendition trial ends with Milan CIA chief given eight years | guardian.co.uk

• Italian court convicts Robert Lady and 23 others in absentia

• First prosecution for US abduction of suspects to torture states

A mid-1990s passport photo of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar

A mid-1990s passport photo of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, who was abducted by the CIA from Milan. Photograph: Marsela Glina/Chicago Tribune/AP

The former head of the CIA in Milan has been given an eight-year jail sentence for kidnapping at the end of the first trial anywhere in the world involving the agency's "extraordinary rendition" programme.

Robert Lady was tried in his absence and convicted of helping to organise the seizure of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street in February 2003. His superior, Jeff Castelli, the head of the CIA in Italy at the time, was acquitted on the grounds that he was covered by diplomatic immunity. Most of the other 23 alleged CIA operatives on trial were given five-year jail sentences in their absence.

Extraordinary rendition involved the abduction of suspects and their forcible transfer for interrogation to third countries, often states in which torture was routinely employed.

The judge ruled that neither the former head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, nor his deputy could be convicted because the evidence against them was subject to official secrecy restrictions. Two other Italian intelligence officials were given three years' jail.

Successive Italian administrations avoided applying to the US for the extradition of the 26 American defendants, who included a senior US air force officer. Their lawyers, appointed by the court, had no contact with their clients, who were regarded in Italian law as being on the run.

Eyewitnesses testified that Abu Omar was stopped, apparently by Italian police, and bundled into a van. The prosecution charged that he was driven to the US air base at Aviano near Venice, then transferred to another American military facility at Ramstein in Germany. He was allegedly flown from there to Egypt.

Four years later he was released without charge. He said he had been reduced to a "human wreck" by torture in a Cairo jail.

The prosecution alleged the Americans enjoyed co-operation from the Italian authorities. The head of the government when Abu Omar was kidnapped was Silvio Berlusconi, who returned to office as prime minister last year.

More than two years after the trial opened, the judge, Oscar Magi, heard final submissions from the prosecution and defence before retiring to consider his verdict. He told the court: "This was not an easy trial and the mere fact of its having been held is a significant event."

The CIA has declined to comment on the case. Successive Italian governments have denied involvement in renditions.

To build their case, prosecutors ordered police to tap intelligence officers' telephones and seize documents from intelligence service archives. Earlier this year Italy's constitutional court dealt the prosecution a heavy blow when it ruled that much of the evidence gathered was protected by official secrecy and could not be used in court. Magi ruled that the trial should continue regardless.

In a reference to the two senior Italian intelligence officials, prosecutors told the court yesterday that the defendants included those who "by kidnapping Abu Omar compromised, rather than safeguarded, national security".

Italian investigators had been tapping the cleric's calls before he was abducted. Court documents leaked to the media showed he was suspected of recruiting young Muslims for the Iraqi insurgency.

The prosecution contended that his seizure not only violated Italian sovereignty but aborted an important anti-terrorist investigation.

via guardian.co.uk

 

Bush hyped fear of terrorism for political advantage | New York Times

WASHINGTON — Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

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After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

The provocative allegation provides fresh ammunition for critics who have accused the Bush administration of politicizing national security. Mr. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, were locked in a tight race heading into that final weekend, and some analysts concluded that even without a higher threat level, the bin Laden tape helped the president win re-election by reminding voters of the danger of Al Qaeda.

Keith M. Urbahn, a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said the defense secretary supported letting the public know if intelligence agencies believed there was a greater threat, and pointed to a variety of chilling Qaeda warnings in those days, including one tape vowing that “the streets of America will run red with blood.”

“Given those facts,” Mr. Urbahn said, “it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to discuss the threat level. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible had that discussion not taken place.”

Mr. Urbahn said “the storyline advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of the book is nonsense.”

Mr. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment. But Mark Corallo, who was his spokesman at the Justice Department, dismissed Mr. Ridge’s account. “Didn’t happen,” he said. “Now would be a good time for Mr. Ridge to use his emergency duct tape.”

Frances Fragos Townsend, who was Mr. Bush’s homeland security adviser, said that “there was a fulsome debate” about the threat level but that “the politics of it were not ever a factor.”

Mr. Ridge’s book, called “The Test of Our Times” and due out Sept. 1 from Thomas Dunne Books, is the latest by a Bush adviser to disclose internal disagreements and establish distance from an unpopular administration. Mr. Ridge complains that he was never invited to National Security Council meetings, that Mr. Rumsfeld would rarely meet with him and that the White House pressured him to include a justification for the Iraq war in a speech.

He also writes that he lobbied unsuccessfully before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to replace Michael D. Brown as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and that the White House killed his proposal to open a homeland security regional office in New Orleans.

The most sensational assertion was the pre-election debate in 2004 about the threat level, first reported by U.S. News & World Report. Mr. Ridge writes that the bin Laden tape alone did not justify a change in the nation’s security posture but describes “a vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion” on Oct. 30 to do so.

“There was absolutely no support for that position within our department. None,” he writes. “I wondered, ‘Is this about security or politics?’ Post-election analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the president’s approval rating in the days after the raising of the threat level.”

Mr. Ridge provides no evidence that politics motivated the discussion. Until now, he has denied politics played a role in threat levels. Asked by Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times if politics ever influenced decisions on threat warnings, he volunteered to take a lie-detector test. “Wire me up,” Mr. Ridge said, according to Mr. Lichtblau’s book, “Bush’s Law.” “Not a chance. Politics played no part.”

Sign in to Recommend More Articles in US » A version of this article appeared in print on August 21, 2009, on page A19 of the New York edition.
via nytimes.com

I wondered where Blair got the idea from.