Susan Urizon already wrote up the Italian arrest warrant issued for 13 CIA ‘operatives’ by a judge in Milan. But that story relied on an early AP piece. Now the NY Times has a much juicer article:

Investigators said the court documents, which remain under seal, identify the 13 operatives by their real names as well as their cover names. In the warrants, Judge Nobili said that all 13 suspects were linked to the C.I.A. and that several served as diplomats at the United States Consulate in Milan, investigators said.

This is amazing. I would have assumed that for extraordinary rendition the CIA would use special crack teams, specially trained for extraction operations.

But apparently the operation included several officers that were operating with little cover in the Milan consulate. Not only that, but they were morons:

…the American operatives used their Italian cellphones to communicate when Mr. Nasr was abducted; they kept the phones switched on for hours at a time, making tracking of their movements easier; they dialed sensitive numbers in the United States, including a number at C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia; and they provided their real names to car rental agencies.

This openness helped the special police retrace nearly every step that the American operatives made during the nine days that they were in Milan for the operation.

:::flip:::

That’s fucking brilliant!! Nicely done. You captured an Italian citizen off the streets of Milan, in broad daylight, and you left a detailed itinerary of all your actions in the nine days leading up to it. They didn’t even make it a challenge:

To track the operatives’ movements, investigators said they had used the records of cellphone calls and stays in good-quality Milan hotels, like the Hilton, Sheraton, Galia and Principe di Savoia. Investigators said they subsequently learned the identities and cover names of the 13 operatives that are now contained in the arrest warrants. The Italian investigators have also collected photocopies of their passports, photographs, the Italian cellphone numbers that they used, and their MasterCard and VISA credit card numbers. They also have obtained the American addresses used by the 13 operatives.

Did I say this operation was fucking brilliant yet?

But what happened to Mr. Nasr after he was seized by a gaggle of jackasses?

…Mr. Nasr was taken within hours of his disappearance to the United States military base at Aviano, in northern Italy, where he was put aboard an aircraft, taken to Egypt on Feb. 18, and jailed there. In April 2004, they said, he emerged from jail in Alexandria, Egypt, and later phoned his wife in Milan and an associate to say that he had been subjected to electric shock treatments. He told his wife that he had been tortured so badly by his captors in Cairo that he had lost hearing in one ear, investigators say. Shortly after placing that call, he was rearrested by the Egyptian police, investigators say, and his whereabouts are now unknown.

Let’s be clear. Unless the Italian government consented to this ‘rendition’ (and I think they would have been able to get a message to Milan about that by now), then the CIA secretly and unilaterally, abducted an Italian citizen and sent him to Egypt, where there is every reason to believe, he was tortured mercilessly. And even now, he is incognito.

Obviously, this is another case of a few bad apples.