What next?

If you'd had time to think about it, you would have figured it out.

The White House and CIA have been considering a package of secret proposals to allow former US intelligence officers to run privatized covert actions, intelligence gathering, and propaganda missions, according to three sources who’ve been briefed on or have direct knowledge of the proposals.

  Buzzfeed

Because the CIA isn't already unaccountable enough?  I very much doubt if it's the White House and "the CIA."  It may be the head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, who was appointed by Trump.

One of the proposals would involve hiring a private company, Amyntor Group, for millions of dollars to set up a large intelligence network and run counter terrorist propaganda efforts, according to the sources.

[...]

Amyntor declined to discuss the proposals, but a lawyer for the company said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that the type of contract being contemplated would be legal “with direction and control by the proper government authority.”

Also to be appointed by Trump.

Another proposal presented to US officials would allow individuals affiliated with the company to help capture wanted terrorists on behalf of the United States. In keeping with that proposal, people close to the company are tracking two specific suspects in a Middle Eastern country, the sources said, for possible “rendition” to the United States.

A source speaking on behalf of the company stressed that while Amyntor officials are aware of and involved in the rendition plan, the company itself would not be involved.

WTF?

The CIA declined to comment, but a US government official downplayed the proposals' significance. “The idea they are pitching is absurd on its face,” he said, “and it is not going anywhere.”

Don't bet your house on it, dude.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council said that Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser, and other officials were not aware of the proposals.

Fucking amazing.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo has publicly promised that the agency would become “much more vicious” and aggressive. He said in one speech that the administration “is prepared to engage in activities that are different from what America has been doing these past few years.”

Jesus christ.  How much more vicious can you get than what the CIA has been?  Perhaps we are about to find out.

Amyntor Group is a reclusive company headquartered in Whitefish, Montana, ...

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Whitefish?

...a town of 6,500 residents that recently gained notoriety after a company based there won, then lost, a $300 million contract to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid. There is no known relationship between the two companies.

Bullshit. It's a town of 6,500 people, ffs. You know what the relationship is. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, hometown: Whitefish, Montana.

But wait! It gets better. (It always does with this pack of hyenas.)

Among the management of Amyntor is John Maguire, a former CIA case officer who reportedly led a US effort to provoke Saddam Hussein into war before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Amyntor appears to be an offshoot of a one-time DoD funded private operation called "The Eclipse Group" which was run by a former Iran-Contra figure, Duane Clarridge, who organized the Contras to overthrow the Sandanista government in Nicaragua and was indicted in that scandal, along with his associates Caspar Weinberger and Elliott Abrams, but all were pardoned by George Bush, Sr. before their trial could begin.  Clarridge died last year.

One source saw the plan presented in a PowerPoint. He says it appeared that the pitches coincided with a widely publicized effort by Erik Prince — the private security official, founder of Blackwater, and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

[...]

Asked about Amyntor’s proposal and the rendition plan, one former senior intelligence official said, “All the institutional structures exist to prevent things from going off the rails. Is this an attempt to circumvent oversight?”

You think?

We were already off the rails. We have gone so far off the rails we'll never find our way out.

And I thought the plan to move Tom Cotton to CIA and Pompeo to State was bad, which it was.

Speaking of Whitefish, Montana...I didn't realize it was a hotbed of white supremacists.

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

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.

The Rendering Continues

A CIA prisoner whose treatment set the torture template in the agency’s notorious Salt Pit jail outside Kabul, and another known as a “ghost prisoner” – held in such secrecy that for years even his name was classified information – have disappeared into Afghanistan’s prison system, where they are once more at risk of torture.

The US military handed the two men to the Afghan government earlier this month, along with several other unidentified foreign captives who are believed to be citizens of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, when they closed a notorious jail on Bagram airbase.

[...]

“There isn’t any evidence against them, they were not captured in Afghanistan, and they were not part of the conflict in Afghanistan,” said Foster, the lawyer.

[...]

United Nations reports raised such serious concerns in recent years that Nato forces twice halted all prisoner transfers. Despite government promises of a crackdown since then, there have been credible reports that torture has persisted under some commanders.

[...]

“The fact that you are holding people without identities makes it hard to protect them,” said Kate Clark, of the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

  The Guardian

And Dick Cheney's Response Will Be: "So What?"

CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on, the European court of human rights said in a historic judgment released on Thursday.

In a unanimous ruling, it also found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin allegedly linked to terrorist organisations

[...]

”Those measures had been used with premeditation, the aim being to cause Mr Masri severe pain or suffering in order to obtain information. In the court's view, such treatment had amounted to torture, in violation of Article 3 [of the European human rights convention]." .

Masri was seized in Macedonia in December 2003 and handed over to a CIA "rendition team" at Skopje airport and secretly flown to Afghanistan.

[...]

"The grand chamber of the European court of human rights unanimously found that Mr el-Masri was subjected to forced disappearance, unlawful detention, extraordinary rendition outside any judicial process, and inhuman and degrading treatment," said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

[...]

In Afghanistan, Masri was incarcerated for more than four months in a small, dirty, dark concrete cell in a brick factory near the capital, Kabul, where he was repeatedly interrogated and was beaten, kicked and threatened. His repeated requests to meet with a representative of the German government were ignored, said the court.

Masri was released in April 2004. He was taken, blindfolded and handcuffed, by plane to Albania and subsequently to Germany, after the CIA admited he was wrongly detained.

  Guardian

At first, I was thinking this was about another individual.

Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was travelling home to Canada from visiting relatives in Tunisia in 2002. While changing planes at New York City's JFK airport, he was detained by U.S. authorities and then transferred secretly to Syria, where he was held for a year and tortured.

"It was so painful," Maher Arar said of the beatings he endured, "that I forgot every enjoyable moment in my life."

Released without charge and allowed to return home to Canada, Maher Arar received an apology and compensation from the Canadian government for its role in his treatment. But the U.S. government has failed to apologize or offer Maher Arar any form of remedy - despite its obligation to do so under the UN Convention Against Torture and other human rights treaties.

  Amnesty

I wonder how many more there are who didn’t get to court.

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.

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.

[...]

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.