Posted on 03/17/2007 2:17:04 PM PDT by Graybeard58
For the second time in just over a month, the Italian government has asked a top court to stop a pending trial of 26 Americans, most of them CIA agents, in a case that could provide the first public examination of a secret U.S. program that targeted alleged terror suspects from foreign lands.
The State Committee of Lawyers, a government advisory board, was asked to review the procedures that led to indictments handed down last month in connection with the abduction from Milan of a radical cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar.
The government sent its request Thursday to the committee, which will pass on its review to the Constitutional Court. The trial is set to begin June 8.
Pietro De Angelis, a spokesman from the Ministry of Justice, said Friday that the court would be asked to look at whether state secrets were breached by the investigation.
The request is focused on whether the judge who issued the indictments allowed the airing of state secrets.
A similar request was made by the government, headed by Prime Minister Romano Prodi, in February. At that time, the government asked the lawyers' committee to focus on whether Milan prosecutors Armando Spataro and Ferdinando Pomarici wrongly used sensitive documents and tapped phone conversations of Italian intelligence agents in their pursuit of the suspects.
Sources close to the prosecution assert the government wants to avoid an examination of how Italy cooperated with the United States' war on terror.
Attempts to indict some of the same Americans on charges related to the cleric failed while former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a staunch U.S. ally during the run-up to the war in Iraq, was in office.
Information about how and why Italian intelligence agencies worked with the CIA could be politically embarrassing and troubling in Italy, where opposition to the U.S.-backed war in Iraq has grown over time.
The indictments of the Americans, including the top two CIA officials in Italy at the time and an Air Force colonel, were the first of several in Europe, which has roiled with protests over a secret CIA campaign to pursue terror suspects.
Suspects were allegedly captured or abducted by agents working for or with the U.S. agency and then flown to a third country for interrogation. Some suspects say they were tortured.
The secret flights were targeted by European Union investigators who have been unsuccessful in their efforts to question or contest the Bush administration's so-called renditions of suspects.
Beyond Italy, there are currently investigations in Switzerland, Germany, Portugal and Spain over the alleged disappearance of suspects tied to the U.S. war on terror.
In the case from Italy, Abu Omar went missing near a mosque in Milan in 2003. Witnesses described a kidnapping in broad daylight. Abu Omar later said he was whisked off the street by Western men, bundled into a van, then flown to a military facility somewhere in Europe and later transferred to an Egyptian prison.
Abu Omar, now free and living in Egypt, has said that he was held, interrogated and tortured while in prison in Egypt. In a television broadcast this week in Italy, he alleged that he also was sexually abused in prison.
His case is considered one of the most highly publicized examples of how the Bush administration relied on third countries for interrogations that allegedly did not meet U.S. judicial standards.
All the Americans charged in connection with the abduction soon left the country and would be tried in absentia. The CIA has declined to comment on the prospective trial, and the State Department has said the U.S. would refuse to extradite any CIA officers if Italy requested it.
Prosecutors in Milan have built their case based on extensive depositions of Italian agents, phone records of those agents and research on the relationship between Italian intelligence operatives and the CIA.
Also indicted with the Americans were two top Italian intelligence officials: Nicolo Pollari, a former chief of military intelligence, and his former deputy, Marco Mancini.
This must come as a shock to the FReepers who were blaming the Italian government for the prosecution in the first place.
If their governement can't control the mob rule, then the country doesn't deserve to exist.
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Don't wish for all of freeperdom to be angry and not type (say) anything about it. Personally find the signs pretty (otherwise they'd have other colors, pictures, sizes, etc.), and of the opinion that currently all of the type should stay (after they get established, then the Notes and even the Warning, and potentially even the links to the other pinglists can be removed).
Think "special prosecutor" and you'll get an idea how Italian and most European courts function. They always have a ravingly left-wing prosecutor or investigating magistrate who has nothing to do but find ways to attack the US or, if that fails, domestic conservatives. Just like a certain Patrick Fitzgerald.
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