Italian Dressing Down

In an angle on the Bush Administration’s insanely botched (and immoral… and illegal… and evil…) handling of yet another aspect of the war on terror, our once-weekly-but-now-irregular-visit-to-Pravda gives us this discussion of the criminal probe in Milan over the kidnap of then-asylum-seeker Abu Omar (a/k/a Hasan Mustafa Osama Nasr) [for those unfamiliar, “Abu Omar” means, more or less, the honorific “Omar’s Dad”].
Abu Omar was pulled off the streets of Milan by a CIA rendition team with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service, driven to the Aviano air-base and hailed off to Egypt in one of the CIA’s rendition/torture planes, after which he was, to put it politely, abused and mistreated at the hands of Egyptian authorities before eventually being released.
An Italian prosecutor in Milan has taken great offense to an orchestrated kidnapping in his jurisdiction, and has handed down indictments of 34 people, 26 of them CIA operatives, and others including Italian intelligence. The prosecutor is about to hand this off to a judge for further action; it is possible for trials in absentia under Italian law.
This is all… a tad embarrassing. Americans know next to nothing about this whole rendition thing, though details are emerging… Ironically, we will learn about our own government’s misdeeds from legal proceedings taking place in other countries… With a Democratic controlled Congress, we can hope that we learn an awful lot more, and fast, via subpoenas to the appropriate officials here. Well, we can hope, anyway. Until then, we’ll just see what comes from Milan this season…
Update 1: Former CIA darling and CIA-assisted-coup-beneficiary Augusto Pinochet finally kicked off, at 91. Pinochet’s record of torture and other atrocities speaks for itself. needless to say, it appears that Baroness Thatcher mourns his passing, even if the only regret of many others is that Pinochet escaped earthly justice (take note Henry… God will get you…)
Update 2: We are incredibly privileged to have an interview discussing the whole extraordinary rendition program that led to the Abu Omar kidnapping, with Trevor Paglen, co-author of “Torture Taxi: On the trail of the CIA rendition flights”.