The Hindu : International : Italy questions CIA's tactics

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Sunday, Jul 03, 2005

International

International

Italy questions CIA's tactics

John Hooper

ROME: ``I was walking down Via Guerzoni with my little girl and I saw a man with a long beard and a djellaba being stopped by two westerners with a mobile telephone. They were asking him, in Italian, for his documents, the way the police do,'' the witness said.

``At the junction with Via Croce Viola there was a pale-coloured van on the pavement,'' she continued. ``Then, all I heard was a loud noise like a thud. The van suddenly shot backwards and then set off again, away from the mosque, passing me at high speed. And the three people I'd seen, they weren't there any longer.'' One of them was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, otherwise known as Abu Omar, a radical Muslim cleric living in Milan and under investigation by the Italian authorities on suspicion of involvement in Islamist terrorism.

Arrest ordered

His disappearance, in February 2003, caused an inquiry that attracted worldwide attention last month when a Milan judge ordered the arrest of 13 American secret service agents accused of the cleric's abduction.

Details from the inquiry have provided a unique glimpse of the way in which the CIA seizes its foes abroad. The prosecutors in charge of the inquiry claim that Abu Omar was the target of what the U.S. terms an ``extraordinary rendition'', the seizure of a suspect by agents for dispatch to a third country, often one in which torture is common.

Washington says it obtains guarantees that suspects grabbed in this way will not be tortured. But, in a call to his wife last year after he was released and before he disappeared again, Abu Omar said he had almost died under torture in an Egyptian jail. His current whereabouts is unknown, though associates say he was rearrested last year.

By ploughing through hundreds of thousands of mobile phone records, tracing hotel registrations and bugging phone conversations, the Italian police have built up a picture of the CIA's operation that offers several surprises. Its special removal unit (SRU) can whistle up private jets to fly its captives unseen across international frontiers: a Learjet took Abu Omar from the joint U.S. base at Aviano in Italy to another U.S. base at Ramstein, Germany, then a chartered Gulfstream V whisked him to Cairo. Yet barely a dollar was spent on making the team's communications secure.

The secret agents used ordinary mobiles. Italian investigators put names to the abductors by matching their calls to the phone contracts they had signed. And they could be sure of the team's movements because they could see when the calls had been made and from which mobile phone. —

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