CIA, Italian Intel Kidnapping Trial to Start in Italy

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STEVE INSKEEP, host:

And let's go next to Italy, where the trial begins tomorrow for a group of CIA and Italian intelligence officers. They're accused of kidnapping, kidnapping an Egyptian cleric. The man says that after he was seized in Milan, he was taken to Egypt and tortured.

This is the first trial associated with the CIA's policy of extraordinary rendition. None of the 26 American defendants will show up. So they will be tried in absentia.

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports from Milan.

SYLVIA POGGIOLI: The prosecution says that on February 17, 2003, CIA agents with the help of the Italian intelligence agency, SISMI, grabbed Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr in Milan. The cleric, also known as Abu Omar, was under investigation in Italy for terrorism.

He was interviewed by Italian TV last March in Egypt, where he's now under house arrest.

Mr. OSAMA MUSTAFA HASSAN NASR (Egyptian Cleric): (Through translator) It was noon as I was walking to the mosque. A man stopped me. He looked American - tall, blond, blue eyes. He said he was the police; then suddenly, other men grabbed me from behind and pushed me into a parked white van. They started punching me all over.

POGGIOLI: He was blindfolded. And the prosecution says he was taken to Aviano Airbase and from there flown to Germany and then Egypt, where he was put in prison.

Mr. NASR: (Through translator) They beat me with nightsticks. They walked over my body. They tied me up and hung me from my feet. They tortured me with electric current. The worst was the genital torture. I was handcuffed for 14 months.

POGGIOLI: Court documents show this extraordinary rendition was expensive and sloppy. The CIA suspects were tracked down, thanks to many clues they left behind - cell-phone calls made from near the abduction site and the Aviano base, car rental receipts and hotel bills totaling more than $150,000. Prosecutors suspect the agents' carelessness derived from their sense of impunity.

The Italian government at the time, a conservative coalition headed by staunch U.S. ally Sylvio Berlusconi, denied knowledge of the operation. John Sifton, senior researcher on terrorism at Human Rights Watch, says extraordinary rendition is not a policy but a crime.

Mr. JOHN SIFTON (Human Rights Watch): We only wish that instead of having a prosecution of the low-level operators, we would have prosecutions of officials in the NSC and the CIA, and even the White House, who approved this rendition.

POGGIOLI: The 26 indicted Americans include two former CIA station chiefs in Italy, Jeff Castelli and Robert Seldon Lady, and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano, who was stationed at the time at Aviano. Prosecutors believed many of the other names are aliases.

Like its predecessors, the current center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi has not sought the Americans' extradition and claims the prosecutors breached state secrecy. The charge triggered a tense confrontation between the executive and the judiciary. Judge Caterina Interlandi, who signed the indictments, condemns the seizure of a terrorist suspect without a warrant.

Judge CATERINA INTERLANDI (Italian Courts): (Through translator) The Abu Omar extraordinary rendition did not improve security. What it certainly did was obstruct the efforts of judicial authorities who were about to arrest him as they later arrested his accomplices. Abu Omar would likely have been convicted, just as his accomplices were.

POGGIOLI: Prosecutor Armando Spataro says extra-judicial practices have additional harmful effects in countries with large Muslim minorities.

Mr. ARMANDO SPATARO (Italian State Prosecutor): (Through translator) Illegal actions such as capturing a person without judicial authorization and these secret prisons do not increase faith in our system; rather they give extremists more reasons to proselytize against us and lead them to believe ours is only a so-called democracy.

POGGIOLI: Abu Omar is not the only extraordinary rendition case in Europe. European governments' complicity with CIA extrajudicial practices is the subject of a report from the Council of Europe expected to be released tomorrow.

Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Milan.

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