The US is using terror tactics and attempting to bully Europeans
On February 16, an Italian court indicted 25 CIA agents, a US Air Force officer and five Italian security officials on charges of kidnapping Egyptian cleric and suspected terrorist Osama Hassan Mustafa Nasr in February 2003.
Nasr, who is also known as Abu Omar, had been under Italian surveillance since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Working with Italian military intelligence, the CIA is accused of seizing Nasr on a Milan street and whisking him to Egypt as part of its practice of extraordinary rendition.
Nasr was held for four years and only released early last month after an Egyptian court ruled his detention was “unfounded”. He claims he was tortured while in jail.
The Wall Street Journal would have us believe such conduct is justifiable under the circumstances but a rogue Italian prosecutor has thrown a spanner in the works. Nobody, including the prosecutor, doubts Nasr posed a security risk in Italy. At the prosecutor’s behest in 2005, an Italian court issued an arrest warrant for Nasr on charges of building a terrorist network. Eight of his accomplices were sentenced to up to 10 years in jail.
Nasr had already been spirited out of the country two years earlier. The New York Times reported in July 2005 that the CIA believed Nasr was planning to attack the US embassy in Rome.
According to the Wall Street Journal, because CIA agents were in Italy with the knowledge of Italian security services, their indictment should be considered “a hostile act against the US. By long-established international legal practice, the official agents of one country operating in another with the state’s permission are immune from prosecution.
“If the CIA agents did anything wrong, that’s up to American authorities to decide,” the Wall Street Journal continued. “An independent prosecutor can indict as many Italians as he wants. His pursuit of US government personnel, however, makes him a rogue.”
This is both arrogant and stupid. It is absurd to suggest that just because agents were allowed into a country, they were accorded immunity from the laws of that country. Diplomats enjoy a diplomatic immunity that is formally recognised, but it is absurd to suggest intelligence agents have an informal security immunity which allows them to kidnap and torture people.
Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian, Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, who died this week, had already condemned the presumptive attitude of the Bush administration. “I think,” he warned, “the whole notion of America as the world’s judge, jury and executioner is a tragically mistaken notion.”
All 26 of the Americans charged in Italy have already left the country, and a US State Department spokesman announced this week — without waiting for an Italian request or hearing evidence — that the US will not hand over any of the accused. Under Italian law, however, the men can be tried in absentia. The trial is set to begin on June 8, much to the irritation of authorities in Washington DC, who say this could expose the intelligence-gathering techniques of the CIA.
Ever since September 11, 2001, European politicians have been working with the Americans to combat terrorism, but many of them have also been condemning the American methods, thereby fuelling anti-Americanism. “It doesn’t help that many Europeans embrace the preposterous legal notion of ‘universal jurisdiction’, the idea that an ambitious prosecutor can indict and try anyone for an alleged crime committed anywhere in the world,” the Wall Street Journal stated.
MEANWHILE, arrest warrants were issued in Germany last month for 13 CIA agents suspected of the kidnapping and extraordinary rendition of a German terrorist suspect, Khaled al-Masri. He was kidnapped in Macedonia and flown to Afghanistan for questioning. Prosecutors in Germany are considering bringing war-crime charges against former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, attorney general Alberto Gonzales and former CIA director George Tenet. If the Germans have credible evidence against these people, they would be doing humanity a service if they highlight the whole thing in court. They could even hold the trial in Nuremberg.
Some Americans seem to think there was nothing wrong with CIA agents kidnapping a German in Macedonia and transporting him to Afghanistan. If, say, the Cubans kidnapped an American in Canada and dumped him in Syria, there would be hell to pay. But the Yanks have been grabbing Muslims anywhere in the globe and dumping them in Cuba. Of course, they would have us believe Cuba has no respect for human rights, but there is probably no place in Cuba where there is less respect for human rights than at Guantánamo Bay, run by the United States.
Belgian courts were targeting Rumsfeld and US vice-president Dick Cheney, until Belgian law was changed after threats that the Americans were thinking of moving the NATO headquarters from Brussels.
The Belgians are not the only people who have been turning a blind eye because of commercial considerations — are they, Dermot Ahern?
“European officials need to understand the risks they’re running if they keep this up,” the Wall Street Journal editorial warned. “Italy and the US are NATO partners, but such an alliance is meaningless if ‘allies’ make a habit of prosecuting each other for cooperating against a common threat.”
The Americans probably helped to save western Europe with the Marshall Plan after the last world war. Communists might otherwise have gained control of countries like Italy, Greece, Germany and France, and the rest of Europe would have been impoverished. It is understandable that many Europeans are adopting a tolerant and even a sympathetic attitude towards the Americans in their current plight.
If the Americans were seizing suspected terrorists and bringing them to trial, even in the US, more people might understand it. But, instead, they are seizing people without any due process, and handing them over to be tortured.
Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was seized at Kennedy Airport in New York while in transit from Tunisia to Ottawa in September 2002. He was secretly deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned for 10 months, held in solitary confinement and tortured before he was released.
“We knew damn well if he went to Canada, he wouldn’t be tortured,” Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont declared. “He’d be held. He’d be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria, he’d be tortured. And it’s beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured.”
Arar was awarded $10.5m in damages by the Canadian government, but his case was dismissed in the US. The judge said he could not declare extraordinary rendition illegal because this could “have most serious of consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both”.
The Bush administration cannot be trusted to respect human rights. Maybe they are honouring their assurance that extraordinary rendition is not being conducted through Ireland. There is one way of verifying this — by inspecting planes. The aim would not be to catch the those engaged in this reprehensible practice but to ensure we never facilitate it.
Americans claim they are fighting terrorism, but they are using terrorist tactics. So terrorists of one kind or other will inevitably win, unless reason prevails.
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