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italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Carsten Wiethoff - 19-07-2013
This one (http://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2013/07/18/CIA-official-held-Panama-Italian-snatch-case_9041857.html) from Italy has a few more details:
Quote:(ANSA) - Rome, July 18 - The CIA's former Milan station chief Robert Lady has been detained in Panama over his role in the abduction of Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Omar Nasr in Italy in 2003.
Lady has been sentenced to nine years in prison in Italy over the case. Italian Justice Minister Annamaria Cancellieri has signed a request for Lady to be detained provisionally in Panama and Italy has two months to request an extradition.
Nasr, an Islamist suspected of recruiting jihadi fighters, disappeared from a Milan street on February 17, 2003 and emerged from an Egyptian prison four years later claiming he had been tortured.
Nasr was snatched by a team of CIA operatives with the help of Italian secret service agency SISMI and taken to a NATO base in Ramstein, Germany, en route to Cairo.
Last September Italy's top court of appeals upheld the convictions of 22 CIA agents, including Lady, found guilty of abducting Nasr in the world's first judicial examination of the controversial US practice of extraordinary rendition in the so-called war on terror.
Cancellieri's predecessor, Paola Severino, in December decided launch international search procedures after the Cassation's ruling, which made the convictions definitive. In a separate proceedings, former SISMI director Nicolò Pollari, his deputy Marco Mancini and the CIA's former Italy chief Jeffrey Castelli were sentence to 10, nine and seven years in jail respectively in February.
The other two CIA agents were sentenced to six years in prison.
In April Italian President Giorgio Napolitano pardoned a retired US airforce officer, Joseph L. Romano, who, like the other American nationals, was convicted in absentia.
Extraordinary rendition was first authorised by former American president Bill Clinton in the 1990s and stepped up when his successor George W. Bush declared war on terror after the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda.
During the trials the CIA had refused to comment and its officers were silent until Lady told an Italian daily in August 2009 that he was only following orders.
Lady, who has now retired, said from an undisclosed location that he was "a soldier...in a war against terrorism".
The trial of Nasr claimed headlines worldwide and stoked discussion of rendition, which was extended by President Barack Obama in 2008 under the proviso that detainees' rights should be respected. The Council of Europe, a 47-nation human rights body,called Nasr's case a "perfect example of rendition".
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Magda Hassan - 20-07-2013
Carsten Wiethoff Wrote:This one (http://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2013/07/18/CIA-official-held-Panama-Italian-snatch-case_9041857.html) from Italy has a few more details:The Nuremberg defense. Didn't work then and wont work now. So, the orders came from above. The Bush Stae Dept. Or if he was only using that for cover maybe Langley?
Quote:Extraordinary rendition was first authorised by former American president Bill Clinton in the 1990s and stepped up when his successor George W. Bush declared war on terror after the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda.
During the trials the CIA had refused to comment and its officers were silent until Lady told an Italian daily in August 2009 that he was only following orders.
Lady, who has now retired, said from an undisclosed location that he was "a soldier...in a war against terrorism".
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Magda Hassan - 20-07-2013
Well, colour me shocked...
Quote:http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/panama-releases-former-cia-operative-wanted-by-italy/2013/07/19/c73ebc12-f083-11e2-a1f9-ea873b7e0424_story.html?hpid=z4&utm_content=bufferd80ce&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=BufferPanama releases former CIA operative wanted by Italy
By Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, E-mail the writers
A former CIA operative detained in Panama this week at the request of Italian authorities over his conviction in the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan was released Friday and had boarded a flight to the United States, U.S. officials said.
Robert Seldon Lady's release from Panama appeared to avert the possibility that he would be extradited to Italy, where he faces a sentence of up to nine years in prison for his role in the CIA capture of a terrorism suspect who was secretly snatched off a street in Milan and transported to Egypt.
Lady, who left Panama on Friday morning, was "either en route or back in the United States," Marie Harf, State Department deputy spokeswoman, told reporters at a midday briefing.
It was not immediately clear what steps the United States had taken to secure Lady's release.
The outcome brought a sudden close to brief diplomatic drama that began Wednesday when Lady was detained by border officials as he entered Panama.
Lady and 22 other U.S. government employees most of whom worked for the CIA were convicted in absentia in the case. Poor tradecraft allowed Italian investigators to track the movements of the American operatives in minute detail.
The case also highlighted the practice known as extraordinary rendition, in which terrorism suspects secretly captured in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were delivered to governments suspected of engaging in torture.
Mario E. Jaramillo, the Panamanian ambassador in Washington, had confirmed Friday that Lady "has been arrested in Panama." He added in an e-mail, "Procedures for this kind of international detentions are being followed by Panama at this moment."
Jaramillo could not be reached immediately for comment on the report of Lady's release and return to the United States.
Lady was the CIA base chief in Milan when Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, was bundled into a van as he walked to a mosque. Nasr was secretly flown out of Italy and delivered to Egypt, according to Italian court records.
Although U.S. intelligence officials have said that the Italian intelligence service sanctioned the operation, Italian prosecutors pursued U.S. officials on kidnapping and other charges.
Lady has been living in Latin American, according to former colleagues at the CIA. All of the Americans convicted in the case had left Italy before trial.
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Magda Hassan - 30-07-2013
Former CIA agent blames Bush, Rice for kidnapping of Egyptian cleric in Italy
Published time: July 29, 2013 17:10 Get short URLTags
CIA, Court, Crime, Egypt, Terrorism, USA
The CIA inflated the case of a kidnapped Egyptian cleric in order to protect high-ranked government officials from prosecution in Italy, a former intelligence agent admits for the first time.
Sabrina De Sousa, 55, has long denied involvement with the CIA, and even asked the United States for immunity after she was charged by Italian officials for the 2003 "extraordinary rendition" of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. But a decade after that kidnapping, the case has reemerged in recent days upon news that her former CIA boss in Milan was captured in Panama, only to be sent back to the US in lieu of what would have likely turned into an extradition request from Italy.
Along with former station chief Robert Seldon Lady and 21 others, De Sousa was convicted in absentia for her role in the kidnapping but avoided any sentencing by straying from Italy. Now speaking to McClatchy, De Sousa admits for the first time her involvement in the plot and identifies herself as one of the CIA agents responsible for the international incident.
In an interview published Monday by McClatchy reporter Jonathan S. Landay, De Sousa outted her role with the CIA and added harsh words about the incident that will likely be unable to mend the agency's reputation during a time of strained international relations.
According to De Sousa, the entire abduction was masterminded by Jeffrey Castelli, a former CIA station chief in Rome who she insists exaggerated claims that Nasr posed a threat.
Nasr has maintained that the CIA kidnapped him in 2003, and then relocated him to his native Egypt where he was interrogated and tortured for years without ever being charged. In her McClatchy interview, De Sousa said that Castelli plotted the mission and received approval from then-CIA Director George Tenet despite the cleric not even appearing on a list of top terrorists sought by the US intelligence community.
So unconvincing were claims that Nasr was a threat, in fact, that White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was worried about the CIA's handling. Despite her concerns, she eventually agreed on the operation, according to De Sousa, and recommended it to then-President George W. Bush.
De Sousa told McClatchy that she personally read classified CIA cables before resigning in 2009 which support the allegations she makes today.
And while she has previously denied any involvement in the operation, to McClatchy she says she worked as an interpreter for the CIA "snatch" team that plotted the abduction.
"I was being held accountable for decisions that someone else took and I wanted to see on what basis the decisions were made," she told McClatchy. "And especially because I was willing to talk to the Hill about this because I knew that the CIA would not be upfront with them."
Lady, the 59-year-old former station chief at the CIA's Milan post arrested earlier this month in Panama, told interviewers in the past that he was convicted by Italian authorities for following orders that were passed down from above.
"I'm not guilty. I'm only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors," Lady told Italy's Il Giornale newspaper in 2009. "I console myself by reminding myself that I was a soldier, that I was in a war against terrorism, that I couldn't discuss orders given to me."
After De Sousa was accused alongside Lady, she asked the US State Department for diplomatic immunity in order to avoid prosecution. At the time, she refused to identify herself as a CIA agent despite sources speaking on condition of anonymity largely insisting otherwise.
"The government sent me to Italy to represent this country and then basically abandoned me," she told the New York Times in 2009, referring to herself as an American diplomat, not a spy.
Now speaking out against what really happened, she told McClatchy that "Despite the scale of the human rights violations associated with the rendition program, the United States hasn't held a single individual accountable."
According to De Sousa, 19 of the 21 Americans charged in Italy "don't exist" because the CIA snatch team adopted aliases for the operation.
http://rt.com/usa/desousa-cia-abduction-italy-744/
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Magda Hassan - 30-07-2013
Now You See Him, Now You Don't: Living in a One-Superpower World (or Edward Snowden vs. Robert Seldon Lady)
Monday, 29 July 2013 10:58 By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch | News AnalysisHe came and he went: that was the joke that circulated in 1979 when 70-year-old former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had a heart attack and died in his Manhattan townhouse in the presence of his evening-gown-clad 25-year-old assistant. In a sense, the same might be said of retired CIA operative Robert Seldon Lady.
Recently, Lady proved a one-day wonder. After years in absentia -- poof! -- he reappeared out of nowhere on the border between Panama and Costa Rica, and made the news when Panamanian officials took him into custody on an Interpol warrant. The CIA's station chief in Milan back in 2003, he had achieved brief notoriety for overseeing a la dolce vita version of extraordinary rendition as part of Washington's Global War on Terror. His colleagues kidnapped Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Muslim cleric and terror suspect, off the streets of Milan, and rendered him via U.S. airbases in Italy and Germany to the torture chambers of Hosni Mubarak's Egypt. Lady evidently rode shotgun on that transfer.
His Agency associates proved to be the crew that couldn't spook straight. They left behind such a traceable trail of five-star-hotel and restaurant bills, charges on false credit cards, and unencrypted cell phone calls that the Italian government tracked them down, identified them, and charged 23 of them, Lady included, with kidnapping.
Lady fled Italy, leaving behind a multimillion-dollar villa near Turin meant for his retirement. (It was later confiscated and sold to make restitution payments to Nasr.) Convicted in absentia in 2009, Lady received a nine-year sentence (later reduced to six). He had by then essentially vanished after admitting to an Italian newspaper, "Of course it was an illegal operation. But that's our job. We're at war against terrorism."
Last week, the Panamanians picked him up. It was the real world equivalent of a magician's trick. He was nowhere, then suddenly in custody and in the news, and then -- poof again! -- he wasn't. Just 24 hours after the retired CIA official found himself under lock and key, he was flown out of Panama, evidently under the protection of Washington, and in mid-air, heading back to the United States, vanished a second time.
State Department spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters on July 19th, "It's my understanding that he is in fact either en route or back in the United States." So there he was, possibly in mid-air heading for the homeland and, as far as we know, as far as reporting goes, nothing more. Consider it the CIA version of a miracle. Instead of landing, he just evaporated.
And that was that. Not another news story here in the U.S.; no further information from government spokespeople on what happened to him, or why the administration decided to extricate him from Panama and protect him from Italian justice. Nor, as far as I can tell, were there any further questions from the media. When TomDispatch inquired of the State Department, all it got was this bit of stonewallese: "We understand that a U.S citizen was detained by Panamanian authorities, and that Panamanian immigration officials expelled him from Panama on July 19. Panama's actions are consistent with its rights to determine whether to admit or expel non-citizens from its territory."
In other words, he came and he went.
Edward Snowden: The Opposite of a Magician's Trick
When Lady was first detained, there was a little flurry of news stories and a little frisson of tension. Would a retired CIA agent convicted of a serious crime involving kidnapping and torture be extradited to Italy to serve his sentence? But that tension had no chance to build because (as anyone might have predicted) luck was a Lady that week.
After all, the country that took him into custody on that Interpol warrant was a genuine rarity in a changing Latin America. It was still an ally of the United States, which had once built a canal across its territory, controlled its politics for years, and in 1989 sent in the U.S. military to forcefully sort out those politics once again. Italy wanted Lady back and evidently requested that Panama hand him over (though the countries had no extradition treaty). But could anyone be surprised by what happened or by the role Washington clearly played in settling Lady's fate? If you had paid any attention to the global pressure Washington was exerting in an "international manhunt" to get Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower it had already charged under the draconian Espionage Act, back to its shores, you knew which direction Robert Seldon Lady would be heading when he hit the nearest plane out of Panama -- and I don't mean Italy.
But here was the curious thing: when Panama sent him north, not east, there wasn't the slightest ripple of U.S. media curiosity about the act or what lay behind it. Lady simply disappeared. While the Italian minister of justice "deeply regretted" Panama's decision, there was not, as far as I can tell, a single editorial, outraged or otherwise, anywhere in this country questioning the Obama administration's decision not to allow a convicted criminal to be brought to justice in the courts of a democratic ally or even praising Washington's role in protecting him. And we're not talking about a media with no interest in trials in Italy. Who doesn't remember the wall-to-wall coverage of the murder trial (and retrial) of American student Amanda Knox there? For the American media, however, Lady clearly lacked Knox's sex appeal (nor would he make millions off a future account of his Italian sojourn).
In this same period, there was, of course, another man who almost magically disappeared. In a transit area of Moscow's international airport, Edward Snowden discovered that the U.S. government had deprived him of his passport and was determined to bring him back to Washington by just about any means to stand trial. That included forcing the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales, returning from Moscow, to make an unscheduled landing in Austria and be searched for Snowden.
The NSA whistleblower was trapped in a kind of no-man's-land by an Obama administration demanding that the Russians turn him over or face the consequences. After which, for days, he disappeared from sight. In his case, unlike Lady's, however, Washington never stopped talking about him and the media never stopped speculating on his fate. It hasn't yet.
He's only appeared in public once since his "disappearance" -- at a press conference at that airport with human rights activists from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The U.S. government promptly deplored and denounced the event as something Moscow "facilitated" or "orchestrated," a "propaganda platform," and a State Department spokesperson even suggested that Snowden, not yet convicted of anything, shouldn't have the right to express himself in Moscow or anywhere else.
The truth is: when it comes to Snowden, official Washington can't shut up. Congressional figures have denounced him as a "traitor" or a "defector." The world has repeatedly been lectured from the bully pulpit in our national capital on how necessary his return and trial is to freedom, justice, and global peace. Snowden, it seems, represents the opposite of a magician's trick. He can't disappear even when he wants to. Washington won't let him, not now, not -- as officials have made clear -- ever. It's a matter of morality that he faces the law and pays the (already preordained) price for his "crime." This, in today's Washington, is what passes for a self-evident truth.
The Lady Vanishes
It's no less a self-evident truth in Washington that Robert Seldon Lady must be protected from the long (Italian) arm of the law, that he is a patriot who did his duty, that it is the job of the U.S. government to keep him safe and never allow him to be prosecuted, just as it is the job of that government to protect, not prosecute, CIA torturers who took part in George W. Bush's Global War on Terror.
So there are two men, both of whom, Washington is convinced, must be brought in: one to face "justice," one to escape it. And all of this is a given, nothing that needs to be explained or justified to anyone anywhere, not even by a Constitutional law professor president. (Of course, if someone had been accused of kidnapping and rendering an American Christian fundamentalist preacher and terror suspect off the streets of Milan to Moscow or Tehran or Beijing, it would no less self-evidently be a different matter.)
Don't make the mistake, however, of comparing Washington's positions on Snowden and Lady and labeling the Obama administration's words and actions "hypocrisy." There's no hypocrisy involved. This is simply the living definition of what it means to exist in a one-superpower world for the first time in history. For Washington, the essential rule of thumb goes something like this: we do what we want; we get to say what we want about what we do; and U.N. ambassadorial nominee Samantha Powers then gets to lecture the world on human rights and oppression.
This version of how it all works is so much the norm in Washington that few there are likely to see any contradiction at all between the Obama administration's approaches to Snowden and Lady, nor evidently does the Washington media. Its particular blind spots, when it comes to Washington's actions, remain striking -- as when the U.S. effectively downed the Bolivian president and his plane. Although it was an act of seemingly self-evident illegality, there was no serious reporting, no digging when it came to the behind-the-scenes acts of the U.S. government, which clearly pressured four or five European governments (one of which may have been Italy) to collude in the act. Nor, weeks later, has there been any follow-up by the Washington media. In other words, an act unique in recent history, which left European powers disgruntled and left much of Latin America up in arms, has disappeared without explanation, analysis, punditry, or editorial comment here. Undoubtedly, given the lack of substantial coverage, few Americans even know it happened.
The lucky Mr. Lady's story has followed a similar trajectory. Having vanished in mid-air, he has managed so far not to reappear anywhere in the U.S. press. What followed was no further news, editorial silence, and utter indifference to an act of protection that might otherwise have seemed to define illegality on an international level. There was no talk in the media, in Congress, or anywhere else about the U.S. handing over a convicted criminal to Italy, just about how the Russians must return a man Washington considers a criminal to justice.
This, then, is our world: a single megapower has, since September 2001, been in a financing and construction frenzy to create the first global surveillance state; its torturers run free; its kidnappers serve time at liberty in this country and are rescued if they venture abroad; and its whistleblowers -- those who would let the rest of us know what "our" government is doing in our name -- are pilloried. And so it goes.
All of it adds up to a way of life and the everyday tradecraft of a one-superpower world. Too bad Alfred Hitchcock isn't around to remake some of his old classics. Imagine what a thrillerThe Lady Vanishes would be today.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/17844-now-you-see-him-now-you-dont-living-in-a-one-superpower-world-or-edward-snowden-vs-robert-seldon-lady
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Jan Klimkowski - 30-07-2013
Benito Mussolini declared in speeches across fascist Italy: "O con noi o contro di noi".
Loosely,
You're either with us or against us.
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Carsten Wiethoff - 02-08-2013
On the current 2013 Black Hat conference (where yesterday NSA chief Alexander held the keynote speach) there is a talk about how the Italian authorities identified the 23 CIA operatives that were later convicted, amongst them CIA Station Chief Seldon Lady.
See https://www.blackhat.com/us-13/briefings.html#Cole
Quote:The CIA is no more technologically sophisticated than your average American, and as a result, has suffered serious and embarrassing operational failures.
This is a rare peek inside the CIA's intelligence gathering operations and the stunning lack of expertise they can bring to the job.
In 2005, news organizations around the world reported that an Italian court had signed arrest warrants for 26 Americans in connection with an extraordinary rendition of a Muslim cleric. At the heart of the case was the stunning lack of OPSEC the team of spies used while they surveilled and then snatched their target off the streets of Milan.
The incident, known as the Italian Job inside the CIA, became an international scandal and caused global outrage. What very few people ever understood was that the CIA's top spies were laughably uneducated about cell phone technology and ignorant of the electronic fingerprints left behind.
The story would be startling, though old, if not for the fact that eight years after the debacle in Milan, history repeated itself.
In 2011, an entire CIA network of Lebanese informants was busted by Hezbollah. The reason: cell phone OPSEC failures. After receiving a warning from Mossad, who had lost their network a year earlier the same way, the CIA dismissed Hezbollah's ability to run analytic software on raw cell phone traffic. But they did. And with a little effort, the CIA's network of spies, as well as their own officers, were identified one by one.
This is the true story of American Intelligence's Keystone Kops.
I did not find a video or transcript of the talk yet.
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Carsten Wiethoff - 17-09-2013
From http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/09/12/Former-CIA-member-asks-for-pardon-in-Italian-kidnapping/UPI-52271379024250/
Quote:Yeah, sure, we all follow orders, don't we?WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 (UPI) -- A former U.S. CIA station chief in Italy has reached out to the Italian president seeking to be pardoned for his role in the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric.
Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan, was among 23 Americans sentenced in absentia in 2009 for kidnapping Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Italy and flying him to Egypt, where Nasr was held and tortured by Egyptian officials for seven months, The Telegraph, Britain, reported.
Lady wrote a letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano asking to be pardoned from his sentence, saying he was acting "under orders from senior American officials in liaison with senior members of the Italian government" when he participated in the kidnapping.
"Your advisers will inform you, I am sure, that my efforts and those of my colleagues were able to stop numerous plans and targets of terrorists operating in Milan and elsewhere in Italy," the letter said.
"After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, my government took extraordinary steps and extraordinary risks for those extraordinary times, in order to protect lives," Lady wrote. "I regret the circumstances which existed in 2003 and I regret my participation in any activities which could be viewed as contrary to the laws of Italy. I ask you and Italy for personal forgiveness and pardon."
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Magda Hassan - 17-09-2013
The Italian courts should increase his sentence for trying to pervert the course of justice or the local equivalent. Kidnapping and torture is illegal in Italy. People who do it and are caught just have to wear the consequences of their crimes.
italian court convicts 23 americans kidnapping - Jan Klimkowski - 17-09-2013
Magda Hassan Wrote:The Italian courts should increase his sentence for trying to pervert the course of justice or the local equivalent. Kidnapping and torture is illegal in Italy. People who do it and are caught just have to wear the consequences of their crimes.
Precisely.
Quote:Lady wrote. "I regret the circumstances which existed in 2003 and I regret my participation in any activities which could be viewed as contrary to the laws of Italy."
No. These activities were illegal, and thus prima facie contrary to the laws of Italy.