Busted

Sabrina de Sousa, a 60-year-old former CIA officer who was convicted in absentia in Italy in 2009, faces a four-year prison term for her alleged role in the kidnapping of a radical Egyptian cleric named Abu Omar, who was grabbed off the street in Milan by CIA officials in 2003 and sent to Egypt, where he was imprisoned, interrogated and allegedly tortured.

The extradition of De Sousa and her possible imprisonment in Italy would mark the first time that any CIA officer connected to the highly classified and controversial Bush-era extraordinary rendition programme faced jail.

[...]

[De Sousa] is facing imminent extradition to Italy from Portugal after a high court in Lisbon rejected a last-minute legal appeal.

[...]

"It is a little unnerving,” De Sousa said. “I actually feel more for my family, I just explained to them that it has to be done. It is an enormous injustice.”

  Guardian

In comparison to Abu Omar's ordeal?

The development marks an extraordinary turn of events in a case that had essentially been dormant for years, even after a dogged and independent Italian prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, pursued the Abu Omar case, exposing the classified programme to the world. The prosecutor’s investigation led to the conviction in absentia of De Sousa and more than 20 other American officials. While De Sousa was convicted under her real name, she told the Guardian that most of the others were convicted under their aliases, and are therefore free to travel the world without fear of being detained.

And I bet most, if not all, of them are men.

The case was thrown back into the spotlight late last year after De Sousa, who has dual US and Portuguese citizenship, made the risky decision to leave the safe confines of the US and travel to Portugal, where she was still subject to an EU arrest warrant.

[...]

Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, granted partial pardons to two other defendants in the Abu Omar case late last year, but has so far not responded to a request for clemency by De Sousa.

[...]

De Sousa, a vocal critic of the CIA and US government, has said she is a low-level and innocent scapegoat who has been sacrificed by the US government while high-ranking officials who executed the extraordinary rendition programme have received impunity.

And I have no doubt she is right.

There have been no public signs of support for her case by the US government.

Which should not be a surprise to her.

The former CIA officer, who was working in Italy under diplomatic cover, has said she took part in early stage discussions of the extraordinary rendition programme in general but not specifically about Abu Omar.

So, kind of like Al Capone getting busted for tax evasion.  You pay the piper when you dance.  You weren't born yesterday.  You know - or should have known - how the CIA operates.  Did you volunteer or did they threaten you to get you to join?  I'm not feeling terribly sympathetic.

De Sousa, who is Catholic, told the Guardian that she has written a letter to Pope Francis, urging him to denounce the rendition programme employed by the CIA after the 11 September terror attacks against the US.

The one she took part in. But don't let me go to jail.

Abu Omar, who now lives in Egypt, has also come to De Sousa’s defence, saying he believed she ought to be pardoned and that she had helped to expose the “injustices” in his case.

I take it all back.

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

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.

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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.”

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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.

Justice - Elsewhere

Italy’s former military intelligence chief was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Tuesday for complicity in the C.I.A.’s abduction [and subsequent torture] of an Egyptian Muslim cleric under [the extraordinary rendition] program begun after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

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Twenty-three Americans, including Robert Seldon Lady, a former C.I.A. base chief in Milan, were tried in absentia in the Abu Omar case in 2009 and convicted. All but one of them were C.I.A. agents. Three other Americans indicted in the case, including Jeffrey Castelli, the former C.I.A. station chief in Rome, were given diplomatic immunity and acquitted in 2009, but earlier this month, the Milan court vacated the acquittals and convicted them in absentia. Mr. Castelli was sentenced to seven years in prison and the other two to six years.

  NYT

In reality, of course, they'll just not be able to go to Italy.