Guess What?

The kidnap from a foreign country, rendition and torture of an Islamic cleric living in asylum in Italy is true. If you didn’t want to believe the cleric or any of dozens of other sources, now you can hear it from an ex-CIA agent who was actually involved.

A former CIA officer has broken the U.S. silence around the 2003 abduction of a radical Islamist cleric in Italy, charging that the agency inflated the threat the preacher posed and that the United States then allowed Italy to prosecute her and other Americans to shield President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials from responsibility for approving the operation.

[...]

De Sousa, 57, a naturalized U.S. citizen from India’s state of Goa, was one of 23 Americans convicted in absentia in 2009 by a Milan court for Nasr’s abduction. She received a five-year sentence. An appeals court in 2011 added two more years, and Italy’s Supreme Court upheld the sentence. Nineteen of the Americans, De Sousa said, “don’t exist,” because they were aliases used by the CIA snatch team.

  McClatchy

Back up a second. The United States allowed Italy to prosecute? Since when does the United States have any control over whether or who Italy prosecutes? The CIA folks must really believe that the US is in control of the whole world for everything. (They may be in the midst of getting schooled on the matter by Russia these days.)

But, go on.

Confirming for the first time that she worked undercover for the CIA in Milan when the operation took place, Sabrina De Sousa provided new details about the “extraordinary rendition” that led to the only criminal prosecution stemming from the secret Bush administration rendition and detention program.

[...]

Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr [aka Abu Omar], was snatched from a Milan street by a team of CIA operatives and flown to Egypt, where he was held for the better part of four years without charges and allegedly tortured. An Egyptian court in 2007 ruled that his imprisonment was “unfounded” and ordered him released.

[...]

More than 130 people were “rendered” in this way, according to a February 2013 study by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a U.S.-based group that promotes the rule of law. Many were tortured and abused, and many, including Nasr, were freed for lack of proof that they were hatching terrorist plots, said Amrit Singh, the study’s author.

[...]

The Bush and Obama administrations have never acknowledged U.S. involvement in the Nasr rendition, which makes De Sousa’s decision to speak publicly about it significant, Singh said.

[...]

The CIA declined to comment, but a former senior U.S. intelligence official called De Sousa’s narrative “fairly consistent” with the recollections of other former CIA officials with knowledge of the operation.

[...]

Calling the operation unjustified and illegal, De Sousa said Italy and the United States cooperated in “scape-goating a bunch of people . . . while the ones who approved this stupid rendition are all free.”

[...]

The Senate and House intelligence committees enabled the coverup, De Sousa added, by failing to treat her as a whistleblower after she told them of the lack of prosecutable evidence against Nasr and what she called her own mistreatment by the CIA that compelled her to resign in 2009.

[...]

According to De Sousa, the Bush administration had two thresholds for an extraordinary rendition: A target had to be on a U.S. list of top al Qaida terrorists who posed “a clear and imminent danger” to American and allied lives, and the nation where an operation was planned had to make the arrest.

Neither occurred with Nasr, De Sousa said.

A cleric who preached holy war against the West, Nasr, who is also known as Abu Omar, was living in Italy under a grant of political asylum when he was accosted Feb. 17, 2003, by black-suited men on a Milan street as he walked to his mosque. He was bundled into a white van and driven to Aviano, from which he was flown to Germany and then to Egypt.

And Edward Snowden has nothing to worry about, right?

De Sousa said her assertions are based on classified CIA cables that she read before resigning from the agency in February 2009, as well as on Italian legal documents and Italian news reports. She denies that she was involved in the operation, though she acknowledges that she served as the interpreter for a CIA “snatch” team that visited Milan in 2002 to plan the abduction.

[...]

“I don’t have any of the cables with me. Please put that down,” De Sousa added with a nervous laugh.

Of course, we can already, as good American citizens will surely want to, dismiss DeSousa:  sour grapes (the CIA mistreated her, causing her to resign), and she doesn’t have the cables for proof.

Details of the operation are in the McClatchy article. The mistreatment she is claiming is a result of the Italian case against her which the CIA obstructed her ability to defend or have dismissed, and included collusion of “successive U.S. intelligence leaders, the CIA inspector general’s office, members and staff of the House and Senate intelligence committees, [Condoleeza] Rice, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder.”

De Sousa wanted to resign from the CIA earlier than she did, but, she said, her attorney persuaded her to wait for Barack Obama to take office because he might be more sympathetic to her case.

Hope, huh?

“My life has been hell,” De Sousa said.

[...]

[H]er treatment, she said, provides a warning to U.S. employees serving around the world. If they get prosecuted while doing their jobs, she said, “You have no protection whatsoever. Zero.”

I think that’s in the contract they sign, isn’t it?

I don’t mean to demean Ms. DeSousa’s position – well, I guess I do, because I’m going to do it – but her life has not been “hell” - compared to that of the man she helped render for torture, let’s say. Nor compared to Bradley Manning, who actually exposed atrocities when he saw them. Or ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA – on waste in spending – and is now serving time in prison. Now that the public and insincere political tide has turned in the wake of ex-CIA/NSA employee Edward Snowden’s selfless heroic whistleblowing, we may be seeing more people like Ms. DeSousa – who do indeed have a legitimate complaint, but, like Ron Wyden and many others, didn’t come forward when there was any real danger to them, only after it looked safe to come out from under their respective rocks. Better late than never may be true, but it’s not better than on time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.