Here in the states we have heard many officials and elected leaders in U.S. administration’s and our Reps repeat over and over and over again that "no one is above the law" NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW. We also know that the peasants out here in the real world know that that statement is not the truth. In fact far from it.
Many of us know someone who has done time in our prison system for far less serious crimes than were committed over the last eight years by the Bush administration. We have also watched our congress and our media focus like laser beams on a President who lied under oath about an extra marital affair…blowjobs. And yet we have not witnessed Congress or the media hold anyone accountable for the false pre-war intelligence, THE INTELLIGENCE SNOWJOB, the illegal torture etc etc. Do you think our leaders actually think that the public is blind to these serious contradictions?
Thank goodness that Italian Prosecutor Armando Spataro believes in the rule of law, the Geneva conventions and holding CIA agents and Italian intelligence officials accountable.
"MILAN – An Italian judge found 23 Americans and two Italians guilty Wednesday in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect, delivering the first legal convictions anywhere in the world against people involved in the CIA’s extraordinary renditions program.
Human rights groups hailed the decision and pressed President Barack Obama to repudiate the Bush administration’s practice of abducting terror suspects and transferring them to third countries where torture was permitted.
The Obama administration ended the CIA’s interrogation program and shuttered its secret overseas jails in January but has opted to continue the practice of extraordinary renditions.
The Americans, who were tried in absentia, now cannot travel to Europe without risking arrest as long as the verdicts remains in place.
Despite the convictions capping the nearly three-year Italian trial, several Italian and American defendants — including the two alleged masterminds of the abduction — were acquitted due to either diplomatic immunity or because classified information was stricken by Italy’s highest court."
"
I am looking for contact information for Prosecutor Spataro to say thank you. But until then I will say thank you to him here at Seminal. Thank him for upholding the law in this serious case. Many of us in the states hope and pray our own leaders and officials will follow your honorable lead "
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091104/ap_on_re_eu/eu_italy_cia_trial
Photo of Spataro
http://www.gosanangelo.com/photos/2009/nov/04/24151/
More photos (to bad none of our leaders were in that room learning about the application of the law)
http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/extraordinary-rendition/photo//091104/481/55cd9bf2ba5944589a94c0265c5571ee//s:/ap/20091104/ap_on_re_eu/eu_italy_cia_trial#photoViewer=/091104/481/6b9c89faded54b1fba021469098b857e
More
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33620676/ns/world_news-europe/
Indeed! This Italian prosecutor started just successfully and finished a prosecution of Italian state authorities, while US prosecutors don’t have the cuglioni even to start such a prosecution.
So much for US moral superiority…
Leen, when you find contact information for Prosecutor Spataro, please let me know. Vorrei ringraziarLa anch’io!
As I pointed out in each of the other two diaries on this topic….
If people support prosecutions against the CIA who were just following orders from higher up, why do they not condemn the US soldiers who are the key people enacting the genocide in Iraq that has killed perhaps 3 million people and terrorised, tortured, raped, kidnapped and beaten untold numbers?
Why is it great when the CIA dogs get convicted, but when I write a diary inviting people to condemn the far worse crimes of the US occupation forces, I am called a troll?
Why do progressives refuse to respect the rule of law or even to morally condemn the far worse crime of the war and occupation of Iraq?
Absolutely agree…along with that not one person who created, cherry picked and disseminated the false pre war intelligence
“abandoned and betrayed”
CIA Officer: We ‘Broke the Law’ With Kidnapping
http://www.newser.com/story/73337/cia-officer-we-broke-the-law-with-kidnapping.html
I admire the Italian judge for his courage and think this is the right initial result to its investigation. The convicted Americans are right, too, of course.
These two dozen odd personnel did their jobs. They did what they were trained and ordered to do by the highest levels in the Pentagon and the White House. They implemented one out of hundreds of extraordinary renditions – violent kidnappings – in partial collaboration with Italian state authorities. The action was a “success”, in that the “target” was apprehended, silenced, immobilized and sent on his merry way for an extended bout of verschaerfte Vernehmung.
When the Italian judiciary refused to kowtow to claims of “
US panicinternational necessity”, the Bush administration cut these guys loose like they were military guards at Abu Ghraib.The Obama administration, so willing to pick up Bush’s excesses and make them their own, relied on a tepid defense. No doubt, it and its predecessor also attempted a little blackmail, courtesy of the DoD, the State Department, and those odd little departments whose names read like the abbreviations for dangerous chemicals. That succeeded with the Italian executive, but not with its judiciary, which is used to the risks associated with investigating and prosecuting Mafia dons in their own back garden.
If the US believed in what it’s doing, in what it did, it would have mounted a stronger defense of its employees’ authorized actions. It didn’t. So it doesn’t. But it does it anyway. Just which party, please, was supposed to bring
XXX-ratedadult behavior back to the Beltway?[x-posted on Scarecrow's comment]
Progressives cheer the occasional victory of the rule of law: it’s the aspiration on which our government is founded, though sadly not the reality we live with.
That aspiration is like the prophets in the bible: a breath of hope and fresh air among the fetid political and sexual excesses of kings and potentates. It’s an analogy that goes only so far, because biblical prophets, too, wanted authoritarian rule, but imagined it coming from unreservedly following wise men saying what their God wanted.
Progressives don’t cheer the criminal convictions of two dozen Americans who may have thought at the time that they were doing their duty. We cheer the exposure of their political overlords, who knew what they were doing was illegal, immoral and unlikely to produce anything other than a more hardened opposition, but who did it anyway, purportedly to keep us safe. We have long advocated against the war in Iraq and the worse thought out war in Afghanistan.
I would consider selling the war a vital and direct part of the war effort.
There is more to cheer than a conviction.
By prosecuting the little guys in the CIA the Italians are creating a chilling environment for more of the same behaviour. So much the better if the CIA dogs think Obama could have done more for them.
Progressives foolishly demand prosecutions at the top only. They ask for something that they surely know will never happen so is “safe” to demand. I demand prosecutions at the bottom (not only, but being realistic, yes). We know the elites will back down on that and throw out scapegoats. Doing so helps sew distrust between the bosses and their willing executors. It creates a chilling environment for the executors and tells them their work is morally condemned.
RAW STORY:
According to the Times, “The Italian counterterrorism prosecutor Armando Spataro is seeking 13-year jail terms for Jeff Castelli, a former C.I.A. station chief in Rome, and Nicolò Pollari, a former head of Italian military intelligence, for their suspected roles in the abduction. He is seeking 12-year terms for Robert Seldon Lady, who as C.I.A. station chief in Milan is accused of having coordinated the operation, and Sabrina De Souza, who worked in the United States Embassy in Rome and is accused of having worked closely with Mr. Lady.”
Pollari is also known as the Italian official who first brought to the attention of the White House claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger.
Lady said of the kidnapping in an interview last spring, “Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job.” He also claimed, “”I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors.”
heard that one before. Didn’t work then either.
I know nothing about the CIA; But what do these agents think will happen when they are kidnapping people? How stupid, or fanatical, do you have to be to pull this stuff off? Cause “It’s my job” The United States of America, kidnapping people off the street, in Italy? I just find this astounding.
And I wonder if you can appeal a decision that you didn’t bother to show up for. doubt it.
Amy Goodman interviewed the prosecutor this A.M. for fifteen minutes; You can probably listen to it at “Democracy Now.”
They can appeal.
*********
“SCOTT HORTON:
Well, now, of course, the US government has got to work this out as a diplomatic issue with Italy. And what we’re going to see, I think, after we’ve had appeals concluded and so forth, is an effort by the Americans to get some sort of clemency for its people. But I don’t think that’s going to happen until the appeals process is worked out and until it’s carried down to the end. And in the end of the day, you’re going to have the question certainly still sitting there of compensation for the victim, where I imagine the Italians will insist that that compensation be paid. ”
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/5/italian_prosecutor_in_case_against_cia
1. They fled the jurisdiction;
2. They declined to appear;
3. Their government refused to extradite them for a Kidnapping charge;
I would be surprised if they haven’t lost their automatic right of appeal, and there might not be a lot of sympathy for an application for leave to appeal under the circumstances.
And possibly to be given leave to appeal, they would have to appear in person, in Italy. They may not want to do that.