Mother Jones

Bank Buster | Mother Jones

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:10:00 -0400

"Regulating financial products based on fairness, simplicity, and appropriate risk is an entirely new paradigm," notes Reid Cramer, director of the New America Foundation-Asset Building Program ...

Did America Forget How to Make the H-Bomb?| Mother Jones

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 May 2009 09:51:00 -0400

... we've built to oversee development and maintenance of our nuclear weapons are incompetent," says Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation, who has written about the episode. ...

Obama's Urban Opportunity

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:17:00 -0400

GAO: Pentagon Health Records Don't Compute | Mother Jones

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:45:00 -0400

Instead, much of the sharing involves what are essentially electronic versions of paper documents, rather than fully sortable and analyzable information databases. Without fully computable data, the DoD and VA are "missing 95 percent of the potential benefits of an integrated system," says Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours...

Songs for the Mahdi Army

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:02:00 -0500

One day in Iraq, a friend picked me up from the house in Baghdad's Mansur district and took me to the Shaab district of east Baghdad. We drove past checkpoints manned by "Awakening" militias created by the Americans to counteract the Shiite-led Mahdi Army militia. My friend, a Shiite himself from Shaab, put a tape in the cassette player. "Now we are the Mahdi Army," my friend laughed, as the singing started. The songs praised populist anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi militia loyal to him, which frequently

Phillip Longman in Mother Jones | 'Another Walter Reed-Type Scandal'

Communications — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 11:47:00 -0400

In April, Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours, told the tech website ZDNet that the government "could wire Walter Reed or Bethesda (the two biggest military hospitals) for VistA in an afternoon. Technically, there's no big problem." In fact, VistA's code is so flexible that it's even been adapted for use in other countries. "Yet," said Longman, "there are DOD people who have built their careers on AHLTA and want people to switch to their system." LINK

How to Stay in Iraq for 1,000 Years

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:46:00 -0400

Few Americans had ever heard of a SOFA until earlier this year, when the Internet lit up with a revelation many observers of US foreign policy had long predicted. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, US officials were pressing the Iraqi government to accept an indefinite US military presence, including--and here was the shocker--up to 58 American bases on Iraqi turf.

The term SOFA, shorthand for Status of Forces Agreement, was suddenly all over the news. The countries have been bargaining feverishly over this and a related pact called a Strategic Framework Agreement. The separate pacts have been conflated and confused by foreign policy experts and critics alike. The SOFA provides the legal basis for the presence and operations of US military forces. The framework is a more sweeping--albeit nonbinding--deal that addresses all aspects of the bilateral relationship between Iraq and the United States, including the control of bases, communication between Iraqi and US security forces, and the biggest question: How long? In drafts of the framework, negotiators have referred to "time horizons" for troop withdrawal. Tricky semantics, right? You don't have to be a naturalist to realize that a horizon never gets any closer to the observer.

These agreements are needed to replace the 2003 UN Security Council mandate, set to expire at year's end, that authorized the multinational military presence in Iraq. Enacted without meaningful Iraqi participation, it in essence says that Iraq is sovereign, that the military occupation is a temporary partnership with Iraqi forces, that elections will be held and a democratic transition commence, and that the "multinational" military force will "take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq." A 2007 extension of this mandate was vigorously opposed by the fledgling Iraqi parliament, which appealed directly (and futilely) to the Security Council after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki requested the extension without parliament's approval.

The ongoing negotiations are the Bush administration's last chance to revive its battered Middle East legacy. While the UN mandate could technically be reextended, Iraq indicated previously that the 2007 extension would be the last. To request another would make the Iraqi government appear weak, demonstrate that it isn't in charge, and by extension--literally--concede to the world that the Bush Iraq policy has failed.

But what the administration requested was no ordinary Status of Forces Agreement. It "may be unique from other SOFAs concluded by the United States in that it may contain authorization by the host government…for US forces to engage in military operations," notes the Congressional Research Service.

That's a crucial distinction, according to critics of the US policy in Iraq. In effect, US negotiators were using the SOFA process, which needs no congressional approval, in a quiet attempt to enact a mutual defense treaty without Senate ratification, as the US Constitution requires. As Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and now military expert, told a congressional subcommittee in February, the administration should not "pretend that a major US defense commitment, internal and external to Iraq, is a matter for resolution inside a SOFA."

The administration's struggle to hammer out the future of the US military in Iraq has proved enlightening, at least. Perhaps for the first time ever, the American public is getting a front-row seat to how its government negotiates empire.

In short, a SOFA sets the ground rules. Everywhere the United States military goes, it negotiates a Status of Forces Agreement and related accords that lay out rights and responsibilities of the US and its host, and specify the criminal and civil jurisdiction to which US personnel are accountable. At the end of the Cold War, the United States had SOFAs with about 40 nations. Today, it has more than 100 such agreements, including at least 10 that are classified, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The pacts range from somewhat vague to highly detailed. Agreements with nations like Bangladesh and Botswana for short-term deployments have run as short as a single page, while the SOFA with Germany is a 200-page supplemental to the NATO SOFA, dwarfing that comparatively slim 13-page document with a dizzying catalogue of detail, down to where the mail will be delivered, and by whom.

Counting the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, more than half a million US soldiers, sailors, Marines, national guardsmen, and other uniformed men and women are deployed around the world. What happens when one of them does something illegal is the most commonly addressed issue, and one of the biggest points of contention in the US-host relationship. The Pentagon views SOFAs as essential to protect US troops from being tried and convicted in foreign courts, whose idea of justice can differ substantially from the system Americans are familiar with. In Japan, for instance, after a criminal investigation and arrest, the police often conduct lengthy interrogations that lead to guilty pleas, expressions of remorse, and lighter sentences. There are no jury trials in Japan, and mounting a robust or aggressive defense is viewed as tantamount to admitting guilt.

Even in other Western democracies, standard legal proceedings would seem strange to even the casual Law and Order fan. In France, the judge participates in the criminal investigation (even going to the crime scene with the accused on occasion) and directs the lines of questioning throughout the trial. While the prosecutor and defense attorney are key figures in American courts, they play only a supporting role in the French system.

In any case, these bilateral agreements almost always favor the United States. For example, the SOFA between the United States and Mongolia declares that "criminal offenses against the laws of Mongolia committed by a member of the US armed forces shall be referred to appropriate US authorities for investigation and disposition." Mongolian officials can request a waiver of US jurisdiction, but American officials need not comply: The pact states only that they must give "sympathetic consideration" to such requests.

(What does the United States want with Mongolia, anyway? Location! For the last seven years American troops have conducted the Pentagon's "Khan Quest" exercise alongside Mongolian and other regional forces—and conveniently close to Mongolia's next-door neighbors, Russia to the north and China to the south. This year, the exercises, tentatively scheduled to begin shortly after the close of the Beijing Olympics, will include soldiers from Bangladesh, Tonga, South Korea, Brunei, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Cambodia.)

Even if a SOFA isn't explicit, the legal protections are in there, often as a single sentence like "US personnel are to be afforded status equivalent to that accorded to the administrative and technical staff of the US embassy." Translation: diplomatic immunity.

The Pentagon also negotiates immunity for its personnel via the American Service-Members Protection Act. Passed by Congress in 2002, it bans US military assistance for any country that hasn't signed a so-called Article 98 agreement, in which the country promises not to hand over US personnel to the International Criminal Court. The act had an immediate impact: Military aid and training assistance to 35 countries was suspended in 2003, after they failed to comply by the deadline, and the ICC--established the previous year to prosecute crimes against humanity, such as genocide and ethnic cleansing--commenced its work weakened by US meddling.

These protections, while good for the grunts, can lead to tensions with America's closest allies. In Japan--where the US has maintained a huge military presence ever since World War II--the SOFA has allowed soldiers responsible for egregious crimes against civilians to walk free.

Some 20,000 US military personnel--half of all those deployed to Japan--are stationed on Okinawa, an island at Japan's southern tip. In 2003--fed up with years of stonewalling, inaction, and a string of violent crimes against young Okinawan women--the prefecture's governor, Keiichi Inamine, presented visiting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with a petition demanding a SOFA review that would give Japan a greater say in criminal prosecution.

Bucking diplomatic niceties, Inamine invited the press to the meeting, and included statistics about the crimes carried out against his constituents: 5,157 offenses by US troops, civilian defense personnel, and their dependents over a 30-year period, including 533 murders and rapes. According to Chalmers Johnson, a retired CIA analyst and distinguished expert on Japan and China (see "America's Unwelcome Advances"), the Okinawa governor stressed that the situation was continuing to get worse, with the number of crimes climbing every year.

It's not just individual soldiers who get away with lawbreaking; the Pentagon itself has largely gotten a free pass. Starting in the late 1990s, decades of military pollution led South Korea to renegotiate its SOFA with the United States as the countries were conducting talks to return some US-held bases to the Koreans; the revised version includes procedures for dealing with environmental devastation. But an analysis by the environmental group Green Korea United concluded that the new rules are too weak and muddled to be of much use. For example, it noted, the amended SOFA establishes procedures for Korean access to the US bases. But when a 2002 Korean investigation determined that oil leaking into a subway station was coming from the nearby Yongsan base, US military investigators denied it, and would not let their Korean counterparts on base to verify the claim.

Despite America's periodic disputes with these and other major base-hosting allies--including Italy and Germany--the SOFAs governing the relationships were at least posted online for perusal by the strong-hearted and sharp-eyed. And though weak, unfair, and/or the products of coercion, provisions by which the host nation may seek to prosecute US personnel have at least been tried, tested, and applied.

This isn't the case in many corners of the globe. Consider America's SOFAs with the Middle Eastern nations of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Malaysia, Somalia, and Kenya. All of these pacts remain classified. And the Congressional Research Service's revelation that at least 10 classified SOFAs exist means there are at least 3 others so secret that we don't even know who the host nations are.

Throughout the Middle East, governments go to great lengths to keep any US military presence under wraps. During the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, for example, thousands of US special operations forces were stationed in Jordan--whose government publicly opposes the war, enjoyed close diplomatic and economic ties with Saddam Hussein, and is just autocratic enough to imagine it could hide a substantial US presence from its citizens.

Negotiating a SOFA can be tricky for such nations, whose governments walk a fine line. But to the world, the West, and particularly to Washington, they must appear fully on board with the war on terror. And, depending on their strategic importance to the US, they may be rewarded greatly for such cooperation. In 2002, Jordan, which borders Iraq, accepted $100 million in American foreign military financing; the following year, after King Abdullah II opened his realm to US Special Forces, the assistance spiked to $604 million--it has since leveled off at an elevated $200-plus million per year. To deal with subjects or citizens resentful of any US military presence, one solution is to simply deny it--and that's a lot easier in places like Jordan, where the government severely curtails press freedoms and public speech.

Keeping SOFA negotiations quiet has not been an option in Iraq. These maneuverings, as well as the strategic framework talks, have been carefully watched and well publicized. That's how the United States wanted it, at least initially. But US negotiators have tried to cram all sorts of contentious issues into the SOFA--the most noxious to Iraqis being the demand (since withdrawn) that private military contractors, not just US troops, enjoy immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law. (The memory of Blackwater personnel taking out 17 civilians in a barrage of bullets last fall may well have hardened the resolve of Iraqi negotiators on that point.)

In April, a draft of the security framework, marked "sensitive" and citing the still-incomplete SOFA, unleashed a storm of public criticism, not the least of which came from Iraqi legislators. America would work with Iraq's political and military forces, the draft stated, "to enable them to protect Iraq and its people and to deter foreign aggression." The highest priority, it noted, is "combating al Qaida" along with other "terrorist groups and outlaw groups." Despite this seemingly endless task, the framework's authors repeatedly restated the administration's claim (see "What Permanent Iraq Presence?") that the US presence is temporary and at the "request and invitation of the sovereign Iraqi government."

The document also proposed that US forces could "conduct military operations" and "detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security." This seemed a problematic allowance, given that the US has preemptively detained and held tens of thousands of Iraqis, some for more than a year, without charges. (More than 19,000 were still in US custody as of May 2007.)

In June, Iraqi politicians told Western journalists that the United States' wish list for long-term occupation was even more ambitious. It included 58 US bases (down from an earlier request for 200), control of Iraqi airspace, and legal immunity for soldiers and civilian contractors. And, despite claims to the contrary by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the American proposals went far beyond other long-term US security pacts in that they limited neither the size of the US force nor the types of weapons it could deploy.

In response to assertions that its proposals effectively constituted a treaty for the protection of Iraq, the administration merely stressed that the strategic framework is a nonbinding understanding. In Iraq, however, these proposals have unified the fractious Iraqi parliament in a way few other issues have, with a multiethnic, multiparty coalition emerging to block both the SOFA and the strategic framework.

The future options are limited and lousy from the perspective of a Bush administration intent on securing its legacy. Option one: Negotiate a SOFA and strategic framework that is acceptable both to the Iraqis and the US Congress, thus guaranteeing it will fall short of a robust justification for an ongoing US occupation. Option two: Extend the Security Council mandate and risk derision of Iraqi "sovereignty" and an undermining of the notion of US-Iraqi cooperation. Option three: Cobble together a Memorandum of Understanding that will cover everybody's behind until the next president settles into the Oval Office.

In August, the negotiators showed their cards once again. The Bush administration seems to be pursuing the first option, softening its stance somewhat on key Iraqi demands. A final draft includes the creation of a US-Iraqi committee that would vet US security operations (including the detention of Iraqis), and details the circumstances--including suggested dates and numbers--under which American combat forces would begin to leave. However, Iraqi and US negotiators conceded that the agreement is temporary, conditioned on marked improvements in the security situation, and subject to approval from a still-wary Iraqi parliament.

If this round of negotiations fails, option three seems like the White House's path of least resistance. Just give that MOU a grand title and go back to Crawford, leaving the pesky details, and an ongoing war, for the next guy to sort out.

Peter Bergen in MotherJones.com | 'Lieberman: Trading Facts for Fear To Help McCain'

Communications — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:24:00 -0400

...Was Lieberman right in his history? Do the evildoers really mount terrorist operations to test new presidents early in their terms? I put this question to Peter Bergen, a journalist who is an expert on al Qaeda and terrorism. (He's written two good books on al Qaeda.) Bergen replies:

"The planning cycle of these ops militate against the idea that they were planned to test the new president. 9/11 was on the drawing board in 1996 and serious planning began in 1999.

There is no doubt al Qaeda would like to test a new president with an attack but they also hoped to test President Bush in 2006 with the plan to blow up seven US and Canadian planes leaving the UK. Had it succeeded this would have been a 9/11 style event six year into Bush's two-term presidency.

Similarly, Ahmed Ressam arrived in the United States in December 1999 from Canada, planning to blow up LAX airport in the waning days of Clintons presidency. Luckily he was arrested, but the attack was supposed to take place in the final days of the Clinton presidency, not because of presidential politics but because that was when the plotters were ready. And also Xmas in LAX probably meant more potential victims..." LINK

Daniel Levy in Mother Jones blog | 'Iran Panic? Talk About It With the Experts'

Communications — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:17:00 -0400

Daniel Levy, a former Middle East peace negotiator, is Director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation, and of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation:

"I'm going to look at the Israeli side of the equation as I think this is the direction that any action is most likely to come from, although the blowback would of course most likely impact the US (and perhaps embroil it in a war with Iran). Also I will not address how disastrous the consequences of a military strike would be in my opinion, notably for Israel and its supporters in the US..." LINK

I Was Kidnapped by the CIA

Ron Tang — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

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, almost casually, 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 Central Intelligence Agency on the streets of Milan, Italy.

First introduced during the Clinton administration, extraordinary renditions -- in which suspected terrorists are turned over to countries known to use torture, usually for the purpose of extracting information from them -- have been one of the CIA's most controversial tools in the war on terror. According to legal experts, the practice has no justification in United States law and flagrantly violates the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty that Congress ratified in 1994. Nonetheless, Congress and the American courts have essentially ignored the practice, and the Bush administration has insisted that it has never knowingly sent anyone to a place where he will be tortured.

But Abu Omar's case is unique: Unlike any other rendition case, it has prompted a massive criminal investigation -- though not in the United States. An Italian prosecutor has launched a probe of the kidnapping, resulting in the indictment of 26 American officials, almost all of them suspected CIA agents. It has also generated a treasure trove of documents on the secretive rendition program, including thousands of pages of court filings that detail how it actually works. Late last year, I traveled to Milan to review those documents and to Egypt, where Abu Omar now lives. What I found was a remarkable tale of CIA overreach and its consequences -- a tale that could represent the beginning of a global legal backlash against the war on terror.

****

An avuncular, portly man in his mid-40s clad in a turban and a floor-length blue robe, Abu Omar met me at a corner store near his home, the first time he had agreed to talk to an American magazine reporter. He took me to his tidy, cramped apartment near Alexandria's run-down Victorian rail station. The walls were bare other than some religious calligraphy. The screen saver on his computer was a picture of Mecca.

Abu Omar, whose full name is Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, served me pungent coffee and sugary biscuits prepared by his unseen wife. Then, leaning forward in a massive gilded chair, he told me how in the weeks before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he'd felt he was being watched and followed as he walked the streets of Milan, where he'd been granted political asylum in 2001 following an earlier spell of imprisonment and torture in Egypt. A member of Egypt's militant Islamic Group and a part-time cleric, he had been waging a public campaign against the impending war; Italian authorities had been investigating his circle of acquaintances since mid-2002 and believed he might have been recruiting fighters to go to Iraq, a charge he denies.

A little before noon on February 17, 2003, Abu Omar was headed to his mosque, incongruously located inside a garage. 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 produced his ID. "Suddenly I was lifted in the air," he recalled. He was dragged into a white van and beaten, he said, 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, he was back in Egypt.

Abu Omar was taken into a building, put in a blue prison suit, freshly blindfolded, and presented to someone described as an important pasha, or government official. The pasha said he'd be released if he'd go back to Italy to spy on the militants at his mosque. He said no.

And so began Abu Omar's descent into one of the 21st 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 Islamists in Italy, though every now and again they'd indicate that they knew he wasn't a big-time terrorist. They were detaining him only because "the Americans imposed you on us." When he asked, "Why, then, do you abuse me so much?" they replied, "This is our family tradition."

In the fall of 2003, Abu Omar was taken to another prison; it was here that he was crucified 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, he was deposited at his mother's home in Alexandria. He promptly called his wife in Italy. It was the first time she'd heard from him in 14 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, Mohamed Reda El Badry, whose phone was also being tapped by Italian investigators. "I was freed on health grounds," he told El Badry in one of the recorded calls. "I was almost paralyzed; still today I cannot walk more than 200 yards... I was incontinent, suffered from kidney trouble."

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 send 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, including stripping and blindfolding prisoners; dousing them with cold water; beatings with fists, whips, metal rods, and other objects; administering electric shocks; suspending prisoners by their arms; and sexual assault and threats of rape.

The White House has routinely claimed that when the United States renders individuals to other countries it receives assurances that, as President Bush stated 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 are demonstrably false. According to a previously unpublished study conducted by Katherine Tiedemann of The New America Foundation and myself, the same is true of many of the extraordinary renditions going back to the program's beginnings in 1995. (See "Rendition by the Numbers.") Fourteen documented extraordinary renditions took place under the Clinton administration. Almost all of those prisoners were rendered to Egypt, where at least three were executed. After 9/11 the pace of renditions sped up and the program expanded dramatically. Prisoners were now also transferred to Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and even Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In all, we found 53 documented cases of extraordinary rendition since September 2001; only one prisoner specifically said he had not been tortured. Of the sixteen men who have been 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.

Brad Garrett is a former FBI special agent who obtained uncoerced confessions from two of the most high-profile terrorists in recent 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. "The whole idea that you would send anyone to some other country to obtain the intel you want is ludicrous," he told me in an email. "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 is 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."

The extraordinary rendition program was not primarily intended to yield information, according to Michael Scheuer, the CIA official whom the Clinton White House tasked with implementing it. "It came from an improvisation to dismantle these terrorist cells overseas. We wanted to get suspects off the streets and grab their papers," Scheuer explains. "The interrogation part wasn't important." He also claims that the program was overseen by congressional committees and "was lawyered to death." After 9/11, "The White House was desperate," Scheuer says. The rendition program quickly expanded because holding any but the most important Al Qaeda prisoners was a "burdensome proposition" for the Agency.

"Before 9/11 we never asked for some guarantee that prisoners would not be tortured or coerced," says Scheuer. The Bush administration says it has since sought such assurances, but Garrett, the interrogator, thinks those promises are worthless in any case. "In my view it is a shell game and a legal CYA to say that the other country (Egypt -- give me a break) will not use torture," he wrote. "We are unfortunately promoting terrorism by using these abhorrent approaches. Shame on us."

****

Milan's slate-grey 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 may have launched the first-ever criminal case against American officials over an extraordinary rendition, but he's hardly a bleeding-heart Euro-liberal. A prosecutor for more than three decades, the affable 59-year-old has put droves of drug traffickers, mafia dons, and terrorists behind bars. When I asked him if he was anti-American, he laughed and asked, "What do you think?" gesturing around his massive office inside the gloomy, Mussolini-era Palace of Justice. The walls were festooned with photographs of marathons he has run in the United States, certificates of appreciation from the Drug Enforcement Administration, and reproductions of paintings by Warhol, Rockwell, and Hopper.

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.

I asked Spataro why he'd pushed so hard to investigate the snatching of a militant he himself was about to indict. In measured tones, he explained, "Kidnapping is a serious crime. It is important for European democracy that all people are submitted to the law. It is possible to combat terrorism without extraordinary means."

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 the 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 disappeared and ran them through a commercial data-crunching program. Of the more than 10,000 cell phones in use during a three-hour window around the kidnapping, 17 were in constant communication with each other. The investigators also determined that soon after the abduction, some of the cell phones' users traveled to Aviano Air Base, a major American installation several hours east of Milan. And virtually all of the phone numbers stopped working two or three days after the abduction.

The suspicious cell phones had made calls to the American consulate in Milan and to numbers in Virginia (where the CIA is headquartered). The phones, most registered under bogus names, also made 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 registered under addresses in the Washington, D.C., area, and Spataro believes they used their real passports. Their movements matched those of the suspicious cell phones. Over the course of several weeks the Americans had blown more than $100,000 on easily traceable credit cards at hotels such as the Principe di Savoia, where rates start at $345 a night and 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.

If the Americans had only used encrypted satellite phones and paid in cash -- standard tradecraft, according to CIA veteran Robert Baer, the former operative who was the model for George Clooney's character in Syriana -- Spataro would have had fewer leads to follow. Why the sloppiness? Very probably, say law enforcement sources in Milan, because the Americans had clued in senior Italian intelligence officials about their plans and thus felt safe.

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 10-seat jet departed from Aviano 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. In March 2005, the Chicago Tribune reported that this jet was owned by Phillip Morse, a partner in the Boston Red Sox and one of a number of individuals whose planes are occasionally rented by the CIA.

One of the suspicious cell phones had made hundreds of calls in the vicinity of both the Milan residence and the country house of the CIA's station chief in Milan, Robert Lady. Armed with a warrant, Spataro's investigators searched Lady's country house in June 2005 and found that he'd gone on a 10-day trip to Cairo a week after Abu Omar's abduction. The investigators also found surveillance photos of Abu Omar taken on the street where he was picked up, as well as printed directions to Aviano Air Base. And they discovered a telling email sent to Lady from a former colleague in the Milan consulate: On Christmas Eve, 2004, as Spataro's inquiry was gathering momentum, she told Lady she'd received an email "through work" titled "Italy, don't go there" -- an apparent reference to the investigation. She'd also heard that Lady, who has since retired, had relocated to Geneva "until this all blew over."

Even Arianna Barbazza, the court-appointed public defender for 13 of the 26 American officials indicted in the Abu Omar case, conceded that the case against Lady and his colleagues is substantial. Lady could receive a sentence of up to 15 years. (The trial is scheduled to start in March, although none of the indicted Americans is expected to show up. The CIA has refused to comment on the case or its rendition program.)

Another important break came when Luciano Pironi, the mysterious Italian police officer who had first "arrested" Abu Omar on the street, began to cooperate with Spataro. Prior to Abu Omar's arrest, Pironi was found to have been "frequently and intensely" in contact with Lady. Pironi said that Lady had told him that the operation was approved by the Italian military-intelligence agency, SISMI, and that Lady had received a tip that Abu Omar was planning to hijack a school bus operated by the American school in Milan -- a claim Italian law enforcement officials say is false.

Lady, who speaks fluent Italian and had good relations with his local counterparts, emerges from this tale as something of a tragic figure. He had opposed the snatch of Abu Omar on the grounds that it was counterproductive; he knew that Italy's counterterrorism police had been trying to build a case against the Egyptian militant and had even warned a top Italian counterterrorism official, Stefano D'Ambrosio, that the CIA was planning the Abu Omar operation. D'Ambrosio told Italian investigators that Lady considered the whole scheme "stupid." But Lady was forced to lead the operation by his bosses in Rome and Langley, who were under intense pressure from the White House to produce results in the war on terrorism. Lady told Pironi that he'd never have spent all his savings to buy a retirement house in the Italian countryside "unless he had been sure that no inquiry against him was under way."

Today, that house has been seized by Italian authorities and Lady, who fled to the States, is the subject of a Europe-wide arrest warrant. In a final twist of irony, Lady told a friend in the Italian police that in his retirement he'd hoped to work for a firm made up of former CIA officers who specialize in negotiating releases for people abducted in South America.

****

In february 2007, Abu Omar was finally released -- this time, it seems, for good. "Without the human rights and media campaign, I would still be in prison," he told me. The conditions of his release were that he stay in Egypt and keep quiet about his treatment. But realizing that notoriety might be his best protection, Abu Omar attended the trial of a 22-year-old blogger whom the Egyptian government accused of insulting President Hosni Mubarak. (He was sentenced to four years.) In the Alexandria courtroom, he paraded his scars before the cameras and talked about his years of torture. "Now I am a public figure," he told me. "It protects me."

Jobless and still monitored by Egypt's security services, Abu Omar now spends most of his time cruising the Internet and posting occasional comments on Arabic-language newspaper sites. Toward the end of our interview he pulled out a plastic bag stuffed full of Christmas cards with pictures of windmills and little red robins sent by people in the United Kingdom who'd learned about his case through a letter-writing campaign organized by Amnesty International. He told me he is happy that these kind people write, sending the message that someone out there knows he hasn't disappeared.