Italy Revolts Against Rendition

Prospect: Did CIA Go Too Far By Snatching Terror Suspect From Italy?

(The American Prospect) 

Scheuer's similar observations to the Italian daily La Repubblica, coupled with a Washington Post story reporting that "the CIA 'told a tiny number of people' [in Italy] about the action," have had a polarizing effect in Italy. The case has become a sort of Rorschach test for Italians' opinions about U.S.-Italian cooperation in the war on terrorism, dismay over the Iraq War, and concern about Italian government secrecy. "I think a majority of people believe that, somehow, at the technical level, the Italians were indeed informed," says Roberto Monetti, an analyst at the Aspen Institute Italia. "There's a sense that the issue was dealt with at the technical level between the [intelligence] services, but didn't reach the top level of the Italian government. In a way this allows the government to say it never lied."

Nicolo Pollari, the chief of Italy's military-intelligence service, Sismi, claimed to a parliamentary committee that he wasn't informed of the operation. Italian newspaper reports have hinted that Pollari may even be replaced over the scandal. "We can't prove that they want to change Pollari. Right now, it's just a rumor," says Gianni Cipriani, an expert on Italian intelligence and chief of Rome's Center of International Strategic Studies. "Right now, the Italian government has other problems -- election problems."

While Berlusconi's election problems might weigh against Pollari and collaboration with the United States, his terrorism problem is keeping changes at bay. Just two weeks after the Italian press was reporting the blown covers of the CIA operatives involved in the Omar snatch, the July 7 bombings in London put Italy on high alert for terrorism. Two days after those bombings, Italian police arrested 142 people, issuing expulsion orders for 53 of them, and deployed 2,000 carabinieri across the country to counter the threat. A thwarted second wave of bombings led straight to Rome. On July 29, Italian counterterrorism police nabbed one of the second set of London bombers, after he arrived at his brother's flat in Rome by train, and have been questioning him. "After the London bombing[s], people [are] worried about terror[ism]," says Corriere della Sera reporter Guido Olimpio, who helped break the story of the Milan prosecutor's indictments of the CIA agents. "At this moment, the government needs every single intelligence agent to control the situation to counter terror[ism]."

Heightened terrorism fears in Rome have pushed the Omar rendition case out of the Italian headlines for now, but it remains a sleeper issue for the upcoming elections. Did the Italian government tacitly cooperate with a U.S. policy that in effect condones torture? And depending on what the Italian electorate comes to believe, U.S. policy-makers may face their own dilemma: At what point do allies become more important than the intelligence information gleaned from the practice of extraordinary rendition?



Laura Rozen reports on foreign-policy and national-security issues from Washington, D.C., as a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a contributor to The Nation and other publications, and for her blog, War and Piece.