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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (239478)	7/1/2005 12:00:23 AM
From: SilentZ	Respond to of 1572786

Yup yup. Drug plan. -Z

To: Road Walker who wrote (239478)	7/1/2005 1:42:49 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1572786

Oh oh.........looks like things are getting a little sticky again with Italy. *************************************************** Italian Denials Add Fuel to Clash With CIA** By Tracy Wilkinson and Greg Miller, Times Staff Writers ROME -- In a case threatening to explode into a major diplomatic row, the Italian government Thursday denied it authorized or even knew about an operation in which CIA agents allegedly kidnapped a radical Egyptian cleric from the streets of Milan and transported him to Egypt for interrogation and torture. Italy's denial flew in the face of assertions by former CIA officials that the agency had obtained the consent of the Italian intelligence service before dispatching a CIA paramilitary team to nab the cleric. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi Thursday summoned the U.S. ambassador to his palace for an explanation of U.S. actions in the two year-old incident. The case gained sudden attention last week when a judge in Milan issued arrest warrants for 13 American intelligence operatives on kidnapping charges. They were, according to court documents, part of a 19-member team led by the CIA lead officer in Milan that followed and then abducted Hassan Osama Nasr, a radical imam suspected by Italian investigators of heading a terror network. The agents shoved Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, into a white mini-van and drove him four or five hours to the U.S.-run Aviano air base, where he was put aboard a jet and flown to Egypt, with a stopover at another U.S. base in Germany, according to Italian prosecutors. Abu Omar was released in early 2004 and said he had been dumped into an Egyptian jail, where he was tortured and beaten during interrogations. He has since disappeared again but is believed to be back in an Egyptian prison. The action by the Milan judiciary is the first time that an ally of the United States has attempted to arrest and prosecute its spies in connection with what appears to have been an "extraordinary rendition," the CIA practice of seizing suspected terrorists and transporting them to third countries without judicial permission. The lead prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, has said he plans to seek extradition of the American agents he named in the arrest warrants. Italian authorities also asked Interpol for help in arresting the 10 men and three women. Italian law enforcement officials have said they were outraged by the February, 2003, abduction because it ruined the case they were building against Abu Omar, five of whose associates are currently on trial in Milan on terror charges. Opposition politicians contended that allowing the CIA to conduct an operation of questionable legality was a violation of national sovereignty. Berlusconi, until now, had refused to comment on the tricky case. On Thursday, however, a junior member of Berlusconi's cabinet went before parliament to present the government's views. In convoluted language, Carlo Giovanardi, the minister for parliamentary affairs, said it was "not even imaginable" that the kind of CIA commando operation described in Milan could have been authorized by Italian institutions. "Our secret services were not aware of the operation," said an uncomfortable-looking Giovanardi. "It was never brought to the attention of the government or national institutions." Speaking briefly in Milan later Thursday, Berlusconi confirmed Giovanardi's comments but declined to elaborate. He said he expected to meet with U.S. ambassador to Italy Mel Sembler on Friday. . The comments from Giovanardi and Berlusconi contradict accounts from former CIA officials involved in or familiar with the operation to snatch Abu Omar. According to the former officials, the CIA's station chief in Rome cleared the mission with his counterpart in the Italian intelligence service before the CIA dispatched a team of paramilitary operatives to Milan. "The notion that it was some sort of rogue operation by the CIA is absurd," one former senior agency official who was briefed on the matter before leaving the agency last year said Thursday. He added that the Italian denials "are to be expected," meaning that ground rules on such operations call for each side to deny involvement if the operation is exposed. "Nobody's going to publicly contradict them," the former official said. The CIA declined comment on the matter Thursday. When he disappeared, Abu Omar was under investigation by Italian law enforcement officials who suspected him of organizing a network of Islamic fighters being dispatched to Iraq. Through extensive wiretaps of Abu Omar's office, his mosque and other locations, Italian authorities documented his meetings with a string of North Africans, Syrians and others, who purportedly discussed suicide bombings and other terror acts. Abu Omar was in Italy with the status of political refugee, which made his secret abduction all the more problematic, according to Judge Chiara Nobili, who ordered the arrests of the CIA operatives. His Egyptian jailers released him in 2004 and during phone calls to his wife and an associate in Milan he described his abduction and the torture. The phone was still being tapped, providing Italian agents with their first complete account of what had happened to the missing imam. The Egyptians threw Abu Omar back in prison after the phone calls, and his whereabouts were unclear for many months. An associate in Milan said this week that Abu Omar remains in prison in Cairo, Egypt. The associate, Abdelhamid Shaari, president of the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, said in an interview that Abu Omar's relatives are able to see him periodically in jail and that he bears scars from the torture. Wilkinson reported from Italy and Miller from Washington. latimes.com