Italian Rendition Case Fading Fast

The Times reports on the trial of 26 CIA officers in absentia in Italy:

Milan Judge Says C.I.A. Trial to Continue, With Restrictions
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

MILAN — A judge here ruled Wednesday that the trial of Italian and American intelligence agents accused of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric suspected of terrorism would continue even though critical evidence had been ruled inadmissible, severely undermining the prosecution’s case.

The judge, Oscar Magi, rejected a defense motion to throw out the charges, based on an Italian Supreme Court ruling issued this year that barred the use of classified information in the proceedings. He ruled that the prosecution could resume its case but that it could not refer to top secret information, including joint operations involving Italian and American spy services.

The Supreme Court ruling has resulted in the exclusion of much of the prosecution’s evidence, including material seized from Italian and American intelligence operatives, narrowing the chances of a ruling in favor of the cleric.

“We’re continuing, but it is more of a formality,” said the lawyer for Nicolò Pollari, the former chief of Italian military intelligence, who is among those on trial.

The case is the first to test the contentious American program of “extraordinary rendition,” in which terrorism suspects are sent for interrogation to other countries, some of which use torture. On trial are 26 Americans, all but one of them operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency, and 7 members of the Italian military intelligence agency.

They are accused of abducting the cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, in Milan on Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors say that the cleric was flown from an American air base in Italy to a base in Germany and then to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured. Classified material had been at the heart of the case.

All the Americans are being tried in absentia.

More background in their opening day coverage.

Comments

[clarice]

Yhere's a reason Italian sulture has existed for so long.

Let the case continue, albeit it without any evidence against the defendants..Let's hope our own agents here are as lucky when Court Pelosi convenes.

[clarice]

**There's .....Culture***

[bad]

Obama is doing his strawman act again in his stupid speech.

[bad]

O is a hero. He refuses to pass the Gitmo problem on to someone else.

[bad]

Lots of Bush bashing...

[narciso]

What a bunch of tripe and folderall, it's like that line by Mary McCarthy about Lillian Hellman, "everything's a lie",
including " and & the"

[bad]

"Stutters McSpendypants"

That's the new name for O by a commenter at Tapper.

LOL

[cathyf]

Actually, there's plenty of non-classified evidence against the astonshingly incompetent CIA agents. Just from memory from the Chicago Trib article from a few years back:

-- Cash tolls on the autostrada are more than the tolls if you use the electronic transponder (just like many toll roads here.) The agents "economized" and so prosecutors have a complete time-stamped-to-the-second record of their trip from Milan to the US air base with the sheik in the car trunk.

-- Multiple agents used credit cards with the same Langley, VA PO box as the "home address".

-- A bunch of agents signed into hotels under their own names so that they could collect their frequent-flier credit.

-- The agents kept switching hotels, presumably to cover their tracks. But there were so many of them, that this just created a huge paper trail of exactly who was part of the operation.

It seemed pretty clear to me that the Italians wanted no part of this prosecution, but that the CIA was so appallingly incompetent that they didn't leave the Italians any fig leaf of plausible way out of prosecuting. Sheesh -- it's a sovereign country -- if you want them to look the other way, the least you can do is give them a direction to look which doesn't have piles of evidence pointing to the Americans.

[narciso]

Yes, they showed a remarkable level of stupidity, that is not an indictable offense, or else you'd need the entire island of Cuba, to hold all the convicted.

[cathyf]

Well, if the stupidity consists of leaving about huge piles of impossible-to-ignore evidence that one has committed an indictable offense, then that's just as good...

[narciso]

You have a point there, Cathy, the issue that the good Imam, was running a ratline into Iraq, all the while there was a plot
to take out the London underground.

[clarice]

Read today (I think WaPo) that Spain is trying to rein in the thre judges there who think they have an international mandate..HEH