The Longest War (19 page)

All of these factors help explain the Bush team’s subsequent decisions to jettison the country’s core principle: that it is a nation of laws. Bush administration officials outsourced more than fifty suspected terrorists to countries that practice torture, set up a prison camp at Guantánamo for around 800
prisoners where the Geneva Convention supposedly did not apply, and authorized the coercive interrogations of some two dozen prisoners, which in some cases amounted to torture.

For hours, the words come pouring out of
Abu Omar
as he describes his years of torture at the hands of Egypt’s security services. Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped. He mentions the hearing loss in his left ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming, takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has unspecified “problems with my wife at home.” He is, in short, a broken man.

There is nothing particularly unusual about Abu Omar’s story. Torture is a standard investigative technique of Egypt’s intelligence services and police, as the State Department and human rights organizations have documented myriad times over the years. What is somewhat unusual is that Abu Omar ended up inside Egypt’s torture chambers courtesy of the United States, via an “
extraordinary rendition
”—in this case, a spectacular daylight kidnapping by the CIA on the streets of Milan, Italy.

First employed while Clinton was in office, extraordinary renditions—in which suspected terrorists are turned over to countries known to use torture—were used to a much larger degree following 9/11 as Bush officials took every measure they could to head off the next attack and to disrupt militant networks overseas. But Abu Omar’s case was unique: unlike any other extraordinary rendition case, it prompted a massive criminal investigation—though not in the United States. An Italian prosecutor launched a probe of the kidnapping in 2003, resulting in the indictment of twenty-six Americans, almost all of them suspected CIA officials, and the case generated
thousands of documents
about the secretive rendition program that detailed how it actually worked.

A little before noon on February 17, 2003, Abu Omar, one of a circle of Egyptian Islamist militants living in exile in Italy, was headed to his mosque in a gritty section of Milan. He strolled down Via Guerzoni, a quiet street mostly empty of businesses and lined with high, view-blocking walls. A red Fiat pulled up beside him and a man jumped out, shouting “Polizia! Polizia!” Abu Omar (whose full name is Osama Hassan Mustafa Nasr) produced his ID. “Suddenly I was lifted in the air,” he recalled. He was dragged into a white
van and beaten by wordless men wearing balaclavas. After trussing him with restraints and blindfolding him, they sped away.

Hours later, when the van stopped, Abu Omar heard airplane noise. His clothes were cut off and something was stuffed in his anus, likely a tranquilizing suppository. His head was entirely covered in tape with only small holes for his mouth and nose, and he was placed on a plane. Hours later he was hustled off the jet. He heard someone speaking Arabic in a familiar cadence; in the distance, a muezzin was calling the dawn prayer. After more than a decade in exile, Abu Omar was back in his native Egypt.

And so began Abu Omar’s descent into one of the twenty-first century’s nastier circles of hell. His cell had no lights or windows, and the temperature alternated between freezing and baking. He was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for seven months. Interrogations could come at any time of the day or night. He was beaten with fists, electric cables, and chairs, stripped naked, and given electric shocks. His tormentors’ questions largely revolved around his circle of fellow Egyptian militants in Italy, though every now and then the interrogators would indicate that they knew he wasn’t a big-time terrorist. They were detaining him only because “
the Americans imposed you on us
.”

In the fall of 2003, Abu Omar was taken to another prison; it was here that he was trussed in the crucifixion position and raped by the guards. After seven more months of torture, a Cairo court found there was no evidence that Abu Omar was involved in terrorism and ordered him freed. He was told not to contact anyone in Italy—including his wife—and not to speak to the press or human rights groups. Above all, he was not to tell anyone what had happened.

After agreeing to the conditions, Abu Omar was deposited at his mother’s home in Alexandria, Egypt. He promptly called his wife in Italy. It was the first time she’d heard from him in fourteen months. Italian investigators, who’d been monitoring Abu Omar’s phone in Milan for years, recorded the call. His wife asked him how he had been treated. He told her sarcastically, “They brought me food from the fanciest restaurant,” though nearly three weeks later, he admitted to her, “I was very close to dying.” He also spoke with a friend in Milan whose phone was also being tapped by Italian investigators. “I was freed on health grounds,” he told the friend in one of the recorded calls. “I was almost paralyzed; still today I cannot walk more than 200 yards.”

And then, just as suddenly as Abu Omar had reappeared, he vanished again. Egyptian authorities had gotten wind of his calls to Italy. This time he was imprisoned for three years. He smuggled out a letter describing his
ordeal, which found its way to the Arab and Italian press and international human rights organizations. Inevitably, that led to more torture.

Was it illegal for American officials to transport Abu Omar to Egypt? Yes, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which prohibits delivering someone to a country where there are “
substantial grounds
” to assume that he might be tortured. Were there substantial grounds to believe that transferring Abu Omar to Egypt would result in his being tortured? Plenty, according to a State Department report that
detailed the methods used
by Egypt’s security services during the year that Abu Omar was abducted and confined. Those methods included the stripping and blindfolding of prisoners; beatings with fists, whips, and metal rods; administering electric shocks; and sexual assault.

The Bush White House routinely claimed that when the United States rendered individuals to other countries it received assurances that, as President Bush asserted at a press conference in March 2005, “They won’t be tortured. …
This country does not believe in torture
.” Several months later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reiterated, “The United States
has not transported anyone
, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured.”

But in the case of Abu Omar, Rice’s assertions were demonstrably false. Fourteen documented extraordinary renditions of suspected jihadist militants took place under the Clinton administration. Almost all of those prisoners were rendered to Egypt, where at least three were executed. Generally those prisoners faced some kind of trial. After 9/11 the pace of extraordinary renditions
sped up dramatically
. Prisoners were now also transferred to Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and even Libya, Sudan, and Syria. These prisoners were rarely put on trial and the transfers were motivated largely by a desire to extract information from the detainees by any means necessary. Fifty-three documented cases of extraordinary rendition took place between September 2001 and February 2008; only one prisoner specifically said he had not been tortured. Of the sixteen men who were released, eight claimed they were tortured and/or mistreated while in foreign custody; one died within weeks of being released. Nineteen of the rendered men have not been heard from since they disappeared.

Philip Bobbitt, a leading American constitutional scholar, pointed out that the policy of extraordinary renditions “
outsources our crimes
, which puts us at the mercy of anyone who can expose us, makes us dependent on
some of the world’s most unsavory actors and abandons accountability. It is an approach we associate with crime families, not with great nations.”

Brad Garrett is a former FBI special agent who obtained uncoerced confessions from two of the most high-profile Islamist terrorists in American history: Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and Mir Aimal Kasi, who shot and killed two CIA employees outside the Agency’s headquarters the same year. Garrett dismisses the idea that useful intelligence can be garnered by depositing suspects in countries where they are tortured. “The whole idea that you would send anyone to some other country to obtain the intel you want is ludicrous,” he said. “If we want the intel
there are approaches
that will render the information without torture. The problem is that someone in the U.S. government became convinced that torture is the way to go, and so if we are not allowed to do it, then send them to someplace where torture is sanctioned.”

Robert Dannenberg, who ran operations for the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) from the summer of 2003 until late 2004, says that the critics of the rendition program should consider the effects that the fear of rendition has had on members of al-Qaeda and allied groups: “Are they looking over their shoulder because they don’t know whether they’re going to get a hood thrown over their head at any given moment of the day and get carried off to vanish? And the answer we got back for that question was, yes, that this is having
a real chilling effect
in the jihadists.” Dannenberg points out that the climate of the times was also important. “If you really want to understand the mentality of the Agency and its CTC particularly at the time, it was all about making sure 9/11 never happens again. We had absolutely clear instruction from the president of the United States, and from the Congress, frankly, do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again, and that was the mind-set. And we felt that the rendition program was an important element in the make-sure-it-never-happens-again category.”

Dannenberg says that the Justice Department produced legal guidance that the renditions were lawful, something that was important to him and his peers: “A lot of us had been around the block a few times performing that type of a mission for the executive and the legislative branch of our government, and then had later been hung out to dry. So to the extent that we could get assurance from the lawful authorities that what we were doing was legal and in line with the mission we’d been given, then we wanted to seek that reassurance.” CIA officials even bought
professional liability insurance
to pay for
their legal bills if they were indicted or had to have a lawyer represent them before Congress, in case their participation in operations such as the rendition program came back to haunt them, as the Abu Omar case in Milan was to do for some two dozen CIA employees.

Milan’s slate-gray skies glower over the city in both summer and winter, and charmless skyscrapers dominate the skyline of the financial, media, and fashion capital of Italy. It’s an unlikely setting for the operatic tale of Abu Omar’s CIA kidnappers and their nemesis, Deputy Chief Prosecutor Armando Spataro. Spataro launched the first-ever criminal case against American officials over an extraordinary rendition, but he was hardly a bleeding-heart Euro-liberal. A prosecutor for more than three decades, he had put droves of drug traffickers, mafia dons, and terrorists behind bars. Spataro had been building a potential terrorism case against Abu Omar for months before his kidnapping; as a result of his investigation, a number of Abu Omar’s acquaintances were convicted of terrorism offenses and in 2005 Abu Omar himself was indicted in absentia on charges that he had been recruiting fighters to go to Iraq. But his sudden disappearance into the bowels of Egypt’s prisons had
set back Spataro’s probe dramatically
.

The prosecutor also didn’t appreciate being lied to—American officials had let it be known around Milan that Abu Omar had likely fled to the Balkans. It didn’t take Spataro long to get past this smoke screen and even track down an eyewitness to the abduction. But the bulk of his case would revolve around a rookie mistake made by the kidnappers: using cell phones, and unencrypted ones at that. Spataro’s investigators reviewed the records from three Italian cell phone companies with relay towers in the vicinity of where the Egyptian militant had disappeared and ran them through a commercial data-crunching program. Of the
more than ten thousand
cell phones in use during a three-hour window around the time of the kidnapping, seventeen were in constant communication with each other. The investigators also determined that soon after the abduction, some of those cell phones’ users traveled to Aviano Air Base, a major American installation several hours east of Milan.

The suspicious cell phones had been used to make calls to the American consulate in Milan and to numbers in Virginia (where the CIA is headquartered). The phones, most registered under bogus names, had also been used to make many calls to prominent hotels in Milan—hotels where, the Italian investigators found, a dozen Americans had stayed in the weeks before the kidnapping. They had registered under addresses in the Washington, D.C.,
area. And their movements matched those of the suspicious cell phones. Over the course of several weeks the Americans had blown more than one hundred thousand dollars on easily traceable credit cards at hotels such as the ultra-fancy Principe di Savoia, which offers a special room-service menu for dogs. Others took side trips to Venice, where they stayed at the five-star Danieli and Sofitel hotels.

Next, Spataro’s investigators began reviewing records from Italian air-traffic control, NATO, and the main European air-traffic facility in Brussels. They discovered that a ten-seat jet had departed from the Aviano base a few hours after Abu Omar was abducted and flew to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. An hour after it landed, an Executive Gulfstream with the tail number N85VM departed Ramstein for Cairo, a jet that was
owned by Phillip Morse
, a partner in the Boston Red Sox and one of a number of individuals whose planes were occasionally rented by the CIA.