The Italian trial of Americans for kidnapping and "rendering" Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr

Twenty-six Americans (CIA) and Italian intelligence officers (Italian SISMI military intelligence)are currently on trial in Italy in the kidnapping and rendition of an Egyptian cleric as part of the CIA's extraordinary renditions program. The CIA officers are being tried in absentia, and the U.S. government has said that if the Italian government asks that they be sent to Italy, the U.S. will refuse.

The current report in USA Today focuses on the Italian trial of the Intelligence officers, both U.S. and Italian, who conducted the clearly illegal kidnapping of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. This report focuses on the kidnapping in Italy and Europe and his rendition to Egypt.

Earlier (March 13, 2005) the Washington Post reported on the investigation that led to the current trial. The same reporter, Craig Whitlock, reported Dec 13, 2005 on a ruse by the CIA to misdirect the investigation.

Italian judicial authorities publicly disclosed the CIA operation in the spring. But a review of recently filed court documents and interviews in Milan offer fresh details about how the CIA allegedly spread disinformation to cover its tracks and how its actions in Milan disrupted and damaged a major Italian investigation.

The European edition of the Stars and Stripes reported Dec 10, 2006 on an attempt to get Lt. Col. Joseph Romano, the former commander of the 31st Security Forces Squadron at Aviano Air Force Base in Northeastern Italy, to comment on the Italian investigation of the kidnapping. Col. Romano declined to comment.

Then the BBC reported Feb 12, 2007 that the Egyptians had released Abu Omar.

Prosecutors have said the cleric was snatched on a Milan street and flown, via Germany, to his native Egypt where he was interrogated.

The cleric has accused Egyptian agents of using electric shocks, beatings and rape threats against him.

He had been initially charged with membership of an illegal organization [allegedly al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya] but the charges were later dropped. Mr Nasr was briefly released in 2004 but was later detained without charge under the north African country's emergency laws.

This is the surface story, the part that can be told in public. Much of the details are covered by secrecy, both American and Italian. The Chicago Tribune addressed why Abu Omar was kidnapped in their story published July 3, 2005.

Why would the U.S. government go to elaborate lengths to seize a 39-year-old Egyptian who, according to former Albanian intelligence officials, was once the CIA's most productive source of information within the tightly knit group of Islamic fundamentalists living in exile in Albania?

Neither the Bush administration nor the CIA has acknowledged any role in the operation. But U.S. government officials privately paint Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, as a dangerous terrorist who once plotted to kill the Egyptian foreign minister and was worthy of an audacious daylight abduction involving more than 20 operatives, weeks of planning and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition that she not be identified, asserted: "The world's a better place with this guy off the streets."

But evidence gathered by prosecutors here, who have charged 13 CIA operatives with Abu Omar's kidnapping, indicates that the abduction was a bold attempt to turn him back into the informer he once was. [Snip]

Milanese prosecutors and police, who had been closely monitoring Abu Omar and knew nothing about his planned abduction, are furious.

"Instead of having an investigation against terrorists, we are investigating this CIA kidnapping," a senior prosecution official fumed last week.

According to the prosecutor's application for the 13 warrants, when Abu Omar reached Cairo on a CIA-chartered aircraft, he was taken straight to the Egyptian interior minister.

If he agreed to inform for the Egyptian intelligence service, Abu Omar "would have been set free and accompanied back to Italy," the document said.

Alternatively, the senior official said, the Americans may have hoped the Egyptians could learn something by interrogating Abu Omar about planned resistance to the impending war on Iraq.

Abu Omar refused to inform, according to the document, and spent the next 14 months in an Egyptian prison facing "terrible tortures." After a brief release in April 2004, he was imprisoned again.

The source of the prosecution's information is Mohammed Reda, another Egyptian imam living in Milan and one of the first people Abu Omar called during his brief release.

Asked to assess Reda's credibility, the prosecution official asserted that "in this case, he had no reason to lie. And when he made his first statements, he was unaware he was being intercepted" by a police wiretap on his cell phone.

If this was all about an effort by the CIA to coerce Abu Omar into becoming an informer again, it certainly got out of hand and screwed up badly.

There will be more about this story as the Italian trial continues.