[Translated from L'Humanité (Paris)]

SUCH INDISCREET CIA TORTURE AGENTS . . .
By Allessandro Mantovani

L'Humanité (Paris)
June 29, 2005

http://www.humanite.fr/journal/2005-06-29/2005-06-29-809576

ROME -- Thirteen CIA agents have been sought since last Friday by Italian judges who accuse them of kidnapping an Egyptian imam, Osama Mostafa Hassan, alias Abu Omar, kidnapped in downtown Milan in broad daylight on Feb. 17, 2003, one month before the invasion of Iraq. The judicial inquiry revealed that the cleric, suspected of "international terrorism," was neutralized, pushed into a van, and driven to Aviano, an American military base in northwestern Italy, then transferred to Egypt in the context of the "extraordinary rendition" program that has been the cause of many cases of "disappearances" of "presumed terrorists" around the world. According to several accounts, Abu Omar, who had already been mistreated at Aviano, was tortured in a Cairo prison, apparently by the same group of secret agents who kidnapped him.

BOB LADY WAS NO LONGER THERE

Since the Milanese court asked for the assistance of Eurojust, the thirteen agents can be arrested in any country of the European Union. The name of the presumed leader of the commando is Robert Seldon Lady, in charge of Milan's CIA detachment until recently and known quite simply as "Bob Lady" by the many employees of the Digos (Italian political police) and intelligence services with which, we have just learned, he closely collaborated. Abu Omar was, in February 2003, being observed by the Digos and Milan's antiterrorist court, too, but the Americans decided to act on their own.

It would appear that Bob Lady also accompanied the Egyptian to Cairo. This specialist in secret warfare, born in Honduras 51 years ago, was already participating in the 1980s in CIA operations in El Salvador and Central America. His links with Italy are so strong that in 2004, after leaving the agency, he decided to retire to the Piedmont countryside, near Asti. His old friends at Milan's Digos went to find him at his villa to arrest him last Friday, following the issuing of a mandate by the judge charged with the affair, but Bob Lady wasn't at home.

EXTREMELY TENSE RELATIONS

This affair should add a chapter to the story of the deteriorating relations between Rome and Washington -- relations that are more and more tense since the assassination in Baghdad by a U.S. Army patrol of the director of intelligence services, Nicola Calipari, last Mar. 4, after the liberation of our colleague Giuliana Sgrena. For the kidnapping of the Egyptian imam, however, the Italian government is refusing all comment for the moment: no protests, no demands that the United States explain. Complete silence in the media and in the Parliament, where the center-left opposition has nevertheless been demanding for the past few days that Silvio Berlusconi and his team react. This silence could well indicated that the CIA's commando had at its disposal on Feb. 17, 2003, a tacit or implicit authorization from Italian authorities. On several occasions, the Bush administration and the CIA have stated that the "extraordinary rendition" program implies that allied governments are given advance notice of operations planned on their territory. This would explain the errors and "goof-ups" of the agents brought in by Bob Lady, who no doubt believed they were protected. The court magistrates have thus been able to reconstruct the kidnapping by following the trail of the Italian cellphones used by members of the commando, later finding photographs left in the best hotels in Milan, where they stayed. The CIA can obviously do a lot better than that when it wants to operate under cover. But so far the search for Italians who helped them has yielded no results.

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Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Home page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu