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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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March 22nd,
2007 - The CIA’s Italian Job |
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By Mohamad Bazzi The Nation March 22, 2007 Cairo - From her third-floor
balcony, the Egyptian woman saw the whole thing: a group of CIA and Italian
agents snatching the imam of her local mosque off a Milan street, stuffing
him into a white van and driving off. It was February 17, 2003, and Hassan
Osama Nasr was walking to the mosque for noon prayers. He was stopped by a
man waving a badge and shouting, "Police!" In perfect Italian, the
man demanded Nasr's ID, wallet and cellphone. Then two men came up from
behind Nasr, grabbed his arms and forced him into the van. It all took about
three minutes. But the agents didn't know
that someone had seen the abduction. The woman called the mosque, and word
spread among worshipers. By evening, the mosque's leaders suspected that Nasr
- a cleric known as Abu Omar who had fled Egypt in 1990 - would be sent back
to his homeland. They phoned Montasser al-Zayyat, a prominent lawyer in Cairo
who has spent his career defending Islamic militants. "The plan was that
no one would see him being kidnapped and he would disappear," Zayyat
said in an interview at his office. "But that Egyptian woman who
happened to be standing on her balcony saved him." Nasr, 44, is now at the
center of the most politically explosive case involving the CIA practice of
"extraordinary rendition," in which a suspected militant is
secretly abducted and taken to another country for interrogation and,
usually, torture. After years of denial, the Bush Administration now
acknowledges using the extra-judicial tactic but insists that it does not
sanction the torture of suspects. In February an Italian judge
indicted twenty-six Americans - a US Air Force colonel and twenty-five
suspected CIA operatives, including the former Rome station chief and former
Milan sub-station chief - for their role in the months-long plot to abduct
Nasr. Although none of the suspects are in custody, the trial is set to begin
June 8, and it has already become an embarrassment for the Bush
Administration and the Italian government. The public relations
disaster may have saved others from abduction and torture. "I suspect
that Abu Omar's case has slowed down the policy of renditions," said
John Sifton, senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism at Human
Rights Watch. "It was an incredible embarrassment for the CIA.
Undoubtedly, it made them think twice about other abductions." But the star witness, Nasr,
might not be able to testify in Italy. He was released from an Egyptian
prison in February, but his lawyer says he is not allowed to leave the
country or to make any public statements. "The Egyptian authorities
warned him that if he speaks about the case, he will be sent back to
prison," said Zayyat. (Egyptian officials had made good on an earlier
threat to throw Nasr back in prison: After being released in April 2004, he
was arrested twenty days later when the secret police learned that he had
been discussing his abduction.) American and Egyptian
officials have refused to comment on the case. Egypt has even refused to
confirm or deny that it had Nasr in custody. But a Cairo appeals court
ordered his release after he'd been held in prison for four years without
charge. And now Egypt, the second - largest recipient of US foreign aid after
Israel, is trying to save its benefactor from further embarrassment by
preventing Nasr from testifying in Italy. "The Americans want this case
to go away," Zayyat said. "They don't want Abu Omar to publicly
describe what happened to him." It's hard to believe that
the CIA didn't know what would happen to Nasr. "Egypt's intelligence
services are infamous for using torture," said Sifton. "The Americans
knew that by sending him to Egypt, he would be tortured," Zayyat said.
"They wanted someone to do this dirty work for them." The trial is likely to
reveal new details about the CIA's covert operations and the complicity of
Italian intelligence services, and to cast a harsh light on the Bush
Administration's dealings with its European allies. Nasr's lawyer plans to
travel to Italy for the trial and to file a lawsuit against the US and
Italian governments, seeking $13 million in damages. Zayyat also plans to
file a separate lawsuit against former Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi, alleging that he personally approved the abduction. Berlusconi
has denied having prior knowledge of the plan. Nasr entered Italy illegally
in 1997 and was granted political asylum four years later. He had fled Egypt
after being imprisoned twice in the late 1980s for antigovernment sermons at
a mosque in Alexandria. Although he has not been charged with a crime in
Italy, he was under investigation for allegedly recruiting Muslim men to
fight in Iraq. Italian officials have said they were about to detain him for
questioning when the CIA abducted him. "Abu Omar is prepared
to go to Italy, even if he's going to be tried and imprisoned," Zayyat
said. "He's convinced of his innocence, and he's confident in the
Italian judiciary." The lead Italian prosecutor,
Armando Spataro, said after the indictments were handed down that he wants
Nasr to testify against the American agents, but Egypt has never responded to
an Italian request for access to the cleric. "Obviously it would be
useful to hear what he has to say," Spataro said. "If he is banned
from leaving [Egypt], there's nothing we can do." In April 2006 Nasr appeared
in an Egyptian court for the first time and gave a detailed, two-hour account
of his experience. Zayyat said Egyptian officials have refused to give him or
Italian prosecutors a transcript of that session. But Zayyat provided The
Nation with four pages of handwritten notes he took during his client's
testimony. Nasr told the court that shortly after his abduction, US and
Italian agents put a black hood over his head and "punched me in the
stomach and all over my body." He was driven to Aviano Air Base, a joint
US-Italian installation, where he boarded a small plane for a flight that
lasted an hour and a half. As Nasr tried to resist, the beatings continued on
the plane. "I was bewildered," he told the court. "I didn't
understand what was happening around me." At a US base in Germany,
Nasr was led into a "large, cold room." His hands were untied and
the hood was taken off. He saw a group of fifteen to twenty men all wearing
masks and Special Forces uniforms. The men wrapped his entire head and face
with duct tape and cut holes over his nose and mouth so he could breathe. He
was stripped of his clothes and dressed in a jumpsuit, and his arms and legs
were shackled. He was then hustled onto another plane. By that point, Nasr
had stopped resisting - and the beating had ended. "I had given
up," he said. "I was resigned to my fate." After the plane landed at
Cairo airport on February 18, 2003, a guard on the tarmac told Nasr,
"You have arrived in Egypt, Abu Omar." Still blindfolded and
shackled, he was stuffed into another van and driven to the Mukhabarat
(secret police) headquarters outside Cairo. Guards removed the duct tape from
his head and face, allowing his hair and beard to take their form. He was
escorted into a room by an Egyptian security official who told him that
"two pashas" wanted to speak with him. Nasr testified that he
recognized one of the men as Egypt's interior minister. The other man
appeared to be an American. "Only the Egyptian spoke," Nasr said.
"He offered me to become an informant. If I accepted, he said, I would
be returned to Italy right away before anyone noticed my disappearance."
Nasr refused, and the two men left. That's when the torture began. He
testified that he was beaten with wooden sticks, given electric shocks and
hung upside down. He was sometimes shackled to an iron rack, nicknamed
"the Bride" and zapped with stun guns. At other times, Nasr
testified, he was tied to a wet mattress on the floor. To prevent him from
moving, a guard sat on a wooden chair on top of Nasr's shoulders. Another
interrogator would then flip a switch, sending jolts of electricity into the
mattress coils. For most of his four years in prison, Nasr was kept in
solitary confinement. He testified that his cell had no toilet and no lights,
and "roaches and rats walked across my body." Nasr spent the first seven
months at the Mukhabarat prison. He was then sent to a State Security prison,
where he was regularly tortured during interrogations. Throughout this time,
Zayyat was trying to confirm that Nasr was in Egyptian custody. "I was
looking for him in the prisons where they keep political detainees. But I
found nothing," Zayyat said. "I filed requests for information from
the courts. Nothing." A year after Nasr's
abduction, Zayyat finally established his presence in Egypt when several
Islamists detained in State Security told the lawyer that they had seen Nasr
being moved around the prison. "It took one year to confirm that he was
here," Zayyat said, shaking his head. "One year! And I still didn't
receive any official word." In March 2004 Zayyat filed a
petition at the appeals court in Cairo seeking Nasr's release. The
prosecutors filed a response, in which they sought to detain the cleric for
"membership in an illegal organization" - usually a reference to
the Muslim Brotherhood or Egypt's two violent Islamist groups, Gama'a
Islamiya (Islamic Group) or Islamic Jihad. Prosecutors argued that Nasr was
active in the Gama'a, which helped assassinate President Anwar Sadat in 1981
and later waged a bloody seven-year campaign to topple the government. But
the court did not find the evidence sufficient, and it ordered Nasr's
release. When I asked Zayyat if he had a copy of the court's decision, he
laughed, saying, "We don't have those kinds of laws in this
country." In April 2004 State Security
agents drove Nasr to his family's home in Alexandria. They told him to keep
quiet if he wanted to stay out of prison. But Nasr immediately called his
wife and friends in Milan and described his abduction in detail. He did not
know that Italian prosecutors had tapped the phones at his home and mosque in
Milan as part of their investigation into the CIA plot. Those wiretaps
provided Italian investigators with their first full account of Nasr's case.
When word got back to Egyptian authorities that Nasr was talking, he was
arrested again. "When they brought me
back to State Security, they said, 'We warned you not to talk with anyone,
but you violated our deal,'" Nasr testified. "'So now we're going
to keep you.'" During this second
imprisonment, Nasr was held under Egypt's emergency laws - imposed by
President Hosni Mubarak soon after Sadat's assassination and never rescinded
- which allow authorities to hold anyone without charge for thirty days. But
the police and intelligence agencies can renew the thirty-day period with
little effort, turning it into indefinite detention. Nasr testified that he
wasn't tortured as badly during his second stint, but he was again placed in
solitary. Despairing and worried that he would never be released, he twice
tried to commit suicide. When Zayyat learned that his
client was arrested again, he began filing monthly petitions for his release.
"Every time the thirty-day period would expire, I would submit another
petition," he said. "It would say, This person is being held
without charge, and there's nothing to justify his detention." In the
end, it was one of these procedural petitions - and, undoubtedly, the growing
international scandal - that won Nasr's release. On February 22 Nasr appeared
unexpectedly at the trial of an Egyptian blogger in Alexandria [see Negar
Azimi, "Bloggers Against Torture," February 19]. In front of the TV
cameras, he pulled back his sleeves to show evidence of the torture he'd
endured: scars on his wrists and ankles. He said there were more scars on his
stomach and other parts of his body that he was too embarrassed to show.
"I don't want any more trouble with anyone," he said. "My body
cannot bear any more prison and torture." When journalists asked him for
more details, he walked away, saying he feared going back to prison. External link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/bazzi |