23 CIA Agents Convicted in Italy



9 minute video produced by the ACLU in which numerous individuals who were abducted and held for years at Guantanamo tell their stories.

This week, 22 CIA agents and the CIA base chief in Milan were convicted in an Italian court of kidnapping an Islamic cleric. The agents abducted Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr off the streets of Italy and took him to Egypt where he was tortured with the help of the CIA. Typically, the major news outlets treated these convictions with hubris and hypocrisy. ABC claimed that the agents were convicted for their role in the “kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect.” What had he done to deserve that suspicion? According to a CNN article:

He was suspected of recruiting men to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and was under heavy surveillance by Italy’s intelligence agency.

In other words, he was a terrorist for recruiting people to fight America’s invasion and occupation of Muslim lands.

CNN’s mindless application of the word “terrorist” for this cleric is just another example of how irresponsible the news media often are on these issues. Moreover, it is an example of how the news media itself promotes American state interests through its reporting. American politicians and the media do not believe that Americans should be held responsible for the terrorism that Americans commit abroad. A transcript from CNN’s “The Situation Room” with a discussion between host Wolf Blitzer and Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the senior legal analyst for CNN, has Toobin decrying the convictions as “troubling” because:

It would be one thing if they only had to stay out of Italy, but, because of Interpol, because of the reciprocal nature of these agreements, they are potentially at risk almost anywhere they go.

Because of course, Americans who work for the U.S. government should be able to travel anywhere and do whatever they want.

Well, working for the CIA is risky because one of the things CIA agents do, at least in part, is break the laws of other countries.

The outcry over this largely symbolic verdict then is that these are Americans working as part of the U.S. empire so “obviously” the consequences for violating other nations’ laws should not apply to them.

That is why the video posted here is so important. What mainstream outlet is going to give this much attention to the stories of kidnapped men who were systematically abused (sexually, physically and mentally) for being at the wrong place at the wrong time? Their stories are not about lone psychos in the military who enjoyed their sadistic games, but of the entire military corps based at Guatanamo.

This is naked power. It is one of the reasons we have to resist being seduced by the state, who claims to be saving us from the violence of the religious fanatics, while all the while committing some of the worst atrocities themselves.

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