Italy set for CIA rendition trial

MILAN, Italy (Reuters) -- Hours before U.S. President George W. Bush visits Italy, 26 U.S. citizens go on trial in absentia in Milan on Friday accused of carrying out one of Washington's most controversial policies in its war on terrorism.

The U.S. citizens, almost all believed to be CIA agents, have been charged with kidnapping a Muslim in Milan in 2003 who was on Washington's list of terrorist suspects and flying him to Egypt where he says he was tortured under interrogation.

Italian spies, including the former head of the country's SISMI intelligence agency, are accused of helping the U.S. citizens carry out the so-called extraordinary rendition.

Washington has said it will reject any request by Italy to extradite the accused.

Prosecutor Armando Spataro said the case was important since it would show the necessity of fighting against terrorism with "the full respect of the laws of our Western democracies".

"We want the punishment of the terrorists, but in the courtrooms. And we don't need to give to our enemies any reason for recruiting other members of their organizations," he said. Italy's prime minister at the time, Silvio Berlusconi, and other critics say the trial is a mistake that sets the country on a dangerous path that could expose secrets of international espionage and create headaches for Rome.

The trial comes at an awkward time for center-left Prime Minister Romano Prodi, an increasingly unpopular leader a year after taking office.

He is trying to keep fractious coalition partners united behind him -- and away from street protests against Bush due to be staged on Saturday.

Pacifists in his coalition want Prodi to pull Italian troops out of Afghanistan and scrap a permit to expand a U.S. military base in the northern city of Vicenza.

Bush's visit threatens to draw out all of those issues.

"As far as I can see, Bush's visit is a liability for him and for Prodi. And the fact this trial is the day before makes it more so," said James Walston, head of the international relations department at the American University of Rome.

"Whatever the merits of the case, it will remind the world ... that it appears American secret servicemen kidnap Muslims in Italy. So, that's a big problem for the U.S. administration."

Prosecutors say a CIA-led team seized Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, bundled him into a van and drove him to a military base in northern Italy.

From there, prosecutors say the CIA flew him via Germany to Egypt where he says he was tortured with electric shocks, beatings, rape threats and genital abuse.

The Italian case begins just over a week after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a suit against a Boeing Co. unit it accuses of helping the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency transfer foreign suspects to overseas prisons.

The suit was filed on behalf of three people, including an Italian citizen, who the ACLU said were abducted by the CIA, detained and tortured.

LONDON: A Council of Europe investigator who last year accused European countries of participating in secret transfers of CIA terror suspects in a fresh report claims to have concrete details describing how clandestine jails operating in Romania and Poland housed ringleaders in the Qaeda movement.

Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who has been leading the inquiry for the pan-European rights watchdog, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, is to release his report Friday, based, he said, on information from disgruntled intelligence agents on both sides of the Atlantic, including members of the CIA counterterrorism center.

Despite fierce denials from governments in Poland and Romania, investigators for Marty said they have confirmed the existence of CIA prisons that relied on trusted intelligence agents in those countries who reported directly to former President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland and to Ion Iliescu and then Traian Basescu in Romania.

Poland has criticized Marty and his investigators in the past for not traveling there to investigate the compound that the report describes as a prison. President Lech Kaczynski has denied the existence of secret CIA prisons, insisting that since he came to power in December 2005 "there has been no secret prison. I am 100 percent sure of it."

The report said that researchers did not visit the Polish compound because it was pointless to visit in person since "we have no doubts about the capability of those who would have removed any traces of the prisoner's presence."

Last year, President George W. Bush acknowledged for the first time that terrorism suspects have been held in CIA-run prisons overseas, but did not specify where.

"What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven," said the report, an advance copy of which was obtained by the British Channel 4 television program, Dispatches. It said the jails operated from 2003 to 2005, adding that, "Large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice."

In northeastern Poland, the main CIA jail was centered in a Soviet-era military compound where about a dozen high-level terror suspects were jailed, the report concludes.

These suspects included Khaled Sheikh Mohamed, who reportedly admitted to plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, and Ramzi Binalshibh, a member of a cell that organized the conspiracy.

Jails were staffed entirely by the CIA and local guards secured the perimeters, according to the inquiry.

The CIA, according to Marty's research, took extraordinary measures to cover its activities. When CIA jets flew to Poland, they used flight plans with "fictitious routes" giving no indication that the airport was the destination.

Although the report singled out Poland and Romania, it said that it could not rule out that other European countries permitted jails.