Former Milan CIA chief arrested over extraordinary rendition conviction - faces 9 years in prison

[smurfy]

[url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23367401[/url]
[quote]A former CIA chief who was convicted by an Italian court of kidnapping a terror suspect has been detained in Panama, Italian officials say.

Robert Seldon Lady was sentenced to nine years in jail for his involvement in the abduction of the man, an Egyptian cleric, in Milan in 2003.

The cleric, known as Abu Omar, was allegedly flown to Egypt and tortured.[/quote]

[Jeep-Eep]

Good.

[catbarf]

That's pretty goddamn hypocritical of the Italian government considering they deliberately facilitated the operation.

[quote]But former CIA officials contradicted this by claiming the agency had secured the consent of Italian intelligence, and that the CIA's station chief in Rome, Jeffrey W. Castelli, had been granted explicit permission for the operation by his Italian counterpart.[12] Furthermore, the circumstances of Nasr's abduction tended to accredit the thesis of at least passive support of the operation by Italian intelligence services. In particular, questions were raised by the CIA agents' startling laxity in travel arrangements. By all accounts, they did little to cover their tracks. Instead of fleeing immediately, most of them remained in Italy days after the operation, in some of Milan's best hotels. Only some of them used aliases. The rest traveled with their normal passports and drivers licenses, paid for things with credit cards in their real names, chatted openly on cell phones before, during, and after the operation. After the abduction, they even carelessly bypassed speed limits in Milan. Some have speculated this represents evidence of Italian complicity, as little apparent effort was made to obfuscate the identities of the participants.[12]

This hypothesis was confirmed by Italian investigations. On July 5, 2006 two high-ranking Italian intelligence officers were arrested by Italian police for their alleged complicity in Abu Omar's kidnapping. These included Marco Mancini, number 2 of SISMI, Italy's military intelligence agency, and Gustavo Pignero, the agency's chief for the northern region of Italy. Italian wiretaps caught Mancini admitting that he had lied about his involvement in the abduction case.[25] These arrests signaled the first official admission that Italian intelligence agents were involved in the abduction. Additionally, the former head of SISMI's Milan office, Col. Stefano D'Ambrosio, claims that he was removed from his position by his superiors because of his objections to the abduction plot; he was later replaced by Mancini.[25][/quote]

[editline]18th July 2013[/editline]

Berlusconi trying to save face as usual by blaming it all on somebody else and feigning ignorance.