Looking for Trouble

On CIA rendition and torture charges

Italy convicted 23 CIA operatives on Wednesday in a 2003 Milan extraordinary rendition case.

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor wrote:

“After two years of wrangling to head off a case that centered around the Bush administration’s practice of abducting alleged terrorists abroad and sending them to friendly third states for interrogation, Italian prosecutors won a stunning victory on Wednesday, when 23 US intelligence agents were convicted in absentia by a Milan court for kidnapping.

“The practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ became common for the CIA after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, with hundreds of alleged militants abducted in Europe and Central Asia and elsewhere, and delivered to states like Algeria, Egypt, and Syria, where torture is often used against presumed enemies of the state. The US says it received assurances that torture would not be used. But the practice has been especially controversial in Europe, where roughly 100 Muslim men have been abducted.

“In a ruling that could damage US-Italian relations, Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan, was handed an eight-year sentence, and the 22 others — all believed to have been CIA employees or contractors — were given five-year sentences for the 2003 abduction from a Milan street of Muslim cleric Hassan Moustafa Osama Nasr. The convicted Americans were also ordered to pay Mr. Nasr and his wife $2 million. It was the first conviction for a rendition case. None of the men are in Italy, and their whereabouts have not been disclosed.”

Meanwhile, also on Wednesday, Daniel Tencer writing for the alternative news site, “The Raw Story,” describes the experience of Britain’s former ambassador in Uzbekistan with the CIA rendition program in that totalitarian country:

“The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

“Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“‘I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,’ he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by The Real News Network. ‘I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.’”

Murray was dismissed as ambassador in 2004 after he documented and raised questions to his superiors about the CIA rendition program in Uzbekistan, the horrific torture taking place in prisons there and that the United States and Britain were relying on that torture to provide them information on suspected terrorists.

The British government first tried to convict Murray of 18 charges, ranging from issuing visas in exchange for sex to driving a car down a flight of stairs. He was cleared of all the charges but not before the details were leaked to the press. With his 20-year career with the British Foreign Service over, Murray continued to work to expose and end torture.

These two news items show how important it is that the U.S. investigation of torture and other war crimes that involve CIA officials and former White House officials be allowed to continue. It will likely be a very ugly can of worms, but it’s time we took a look.