The former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, discusses the United States foreign intelligence service’s cooperation with Germany, the covert kidnapping of suspected terrorists and a Bush adminstration that ignored CIA advice and used whatever informaiton it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq.

From the interview:

Drumheller: Let me give you a general thought: From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism. It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President (George W.) Bush and his entourage could blame someone else. The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn’t do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush Administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions.

Full transcript here

Instead, she said, statements that amounted to confessions from two Italians were so damaging they made it politically impossible for her to seek diplomatic immunity for her client.

All I can say about this is…… goodie goodie.

MILAN, Italy — A lawyer for a former CIA station chief accused of involvement in the alleged kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect withdrew from the case Tuesday, saying statements by Italian spymasters implicating U.S. agents had undermined her attempts to head off a criminal trial.

Daria Pesce, representing former Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, walked out of court as a judge began hearing arguments on whether to indict 26 Americans and five Italian intelligence officials on criminal charges.

A court opened hearings Tuesday into whether 26 Americans and five Italian secret service officials will be indicted for kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003. Prosecutor Armando Spataro, who has led the investigation, requested the indictments last month in a case that highlights the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program in which terrorism suspects are transferred to third countries where some are allegedly tortured. (AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito, file) (Pier Paolo Cito - AP)

A trial would be the first criminal prosecution involving the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, in which terror suspects are secretly transferred to third countries where critics say they may face torture.

No decision on indictments was made Tuesday and further hearings were set for Jan. 29 into mid-February.

“Robert Seldon Lady says that this case should have had a political solution and not a judicial solution,” Pesce said. “The Italian government could have decided it was a state secret _ remember, this was a terror suspect. It would have been possible if the Italian government had had the courage to reach an agreement with the U.S. government.”

Instead, she said, statements that amounted to confessions from two Italians were so damaging they made it politically impossible for her to seek diplomatic immunity for her client.

Read more at the Washington Post

I hope the judge decides in favor of indictments.

MILAN (Reuters) - U.S. and Italian spies urged their governments on Tuesday to prevent them going on trial over the 2003 kidnapping of a terrorism suspect, as an Italian judge began hearing arguments on whether to indict them.

Judge Caterina Interlandi must decide if there is enough evidence for a trial. If so, it would be the first criminal procedure over renditions, one of the most controversial aspects of the U.S. global “war on terrorism.”

The agents are accused of involvement in abducting Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr and sending him to Egypt, where he says he was tortured.

The suspects include 26 Americans, most believed to be CIA agents, and six Italians. None of the suspects attended Tuesday’s closed-door courtroom hearing, lawyers said.

Any trial of the U.S. agents would almost certainly take place in absentia. Washington is not expected to hand them over.

Lawyers for two key suspects said their clients wanted Washington and Rome to resolve the matter.

Read more at the NYTimes

CAIRO — ‘This is how they kidnapped me from Italy” … and how they tortured and imprisoned me in Egypt.”
So begins a 6,300-word, handwritten letter, composed in an Egyptian prison cell by radical Muslim cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr. His abduction by the CIA is at the center of an unprecedented judicial proceeding set to open in Italy this week that may ultimately expose to public view one of the agency’s most sensitive and controversial operations in its secret war on terror.

In a [tag]kidnapping case against 26 Americans and five Italian intelligence operatives[/tag], including the one-time CIA chief in Rome and Italy’s former top spymaster, Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, will speak to the court through his letter, telling his story for the first time in his own words.

According to Abu Omar’s written account, obtained by the Tribune, he was walking to his mosque in Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, when he was stopped on the street by a man who identified himself as a police officer. The cleric wrote that he was pulled into a van, beaten and taken by plane to Egypt.

He described in detail how his Egyptian interrogators tried to get him to agree to become an informer, and he says he refused. What followed, according to his letter, was torture with electric shocks, beatings that caused him to lose the hearing in one ear, and sexual abuse.

Read more at the Chicago Tribune

In a related story, the cleric’s wife claims he was offered $2million to deny kidnapping took place

A CIA jet flew at least twice to Poland from Kabul in Afghanistan, where the US detained terrorist suspects, new details about aircraft involved in “torture flights” show.

The journeys of the aircraft, a Gulfstream registered N379P, are disclosed in a list of more than 3000 flight logs obtained by Stephen Grey, an investigative journalist and author.

The same aircraft flew from Washington via Athens to the British Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia, the logs show. It is the first time that the British-owned territory, where the US has a large airbase, has been linked to the controversial CIA flights.

British Foreign Office minister Kim Howells recently told MPs that the “US authorities have repeatedly given us assurances that no detainees, prisoners of war or any other persons in this category are being held on Diego Garcia, or have at any time passed in transit through Diego Garcia or its territorial waters or airspace”.

Read more at The Age.com

I don’t know if this guy has a lawsuit going, but if he doesn’t…… I hope he does soon. This shit is just wrong….on so many levels. And for our government to do something like this to an innocent man, and there be no consequences….. just burns my ass.

TORONTO - Canadian police said Tuesday they had told U.S. authorities they had no evidence an Ottawa software engineer was an al-Qaida agent before Washington deported him to Syria, where he was tortured.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli said police initially told U.S. authorities Syrian-born Maher Arar was a “man of interest” and may have ties to Islamic extremists but they later told Washington they had no evidence to support those allegations.

Yet U.S. authorities went ahead and deported Arar to his native Syria, where he says he was tortured into making false confessions, Zaccardelli told a public security hearing in the capital Ottawa.

“RCMP investigators clearly informed U.S. officials that there was no evidence to support criminal charges against Mr. Arar in Canada, that he could not be prevented from entering Canada, and that we were unable to link him to al-Qaida,” Zaccardelli said.

Read more at Chron.com

This is a clip from Khaled El-Masri’s hearing in Richmond, VA on November 28, 2006. To learn more about his case go to here