The New York Times Drops Stephen Kappes in It

The New York Times had a long article yesterday about the “Italian job” rendition of an Islamist extremist known as Abu Omar. I liked the last two paragraphs best:

Most of the top C.I.A. officers said to have planned the Abu Omar rendition have left the agency, with the exception of Stephen R. Kappes, who at the time was the assistant director of the C.I.A.’s clandestine branch.

He is now the C.I.A.’s second ranking official.

This is the first mention of Kappes’ involvement I know of. Nice of the NYT to wait until the last two paragraphs to drop him in it. I’m sure it was read with interest at the prosecutor’s office in Milan.

Hattip: Scott Horton.

‘Italian Job’ Verdict: That’s Not Justice

The verdict is in in the trial of CIA, US Air Force and Italian military intelligence personnel over the kidnapping of Islamist extremist Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (a.k.a. Abu Omar). 22 low-level CIA officers got five to eight years, the air force officer got five years and two low-level Italian officials were also convicted. Three CIA officers were acquitted, including Jeff Castelli, the station chief who dreamed up the whole operation. The acquittal was on the grounds of diplomatic immunity. Other Italian officials were acquitted on state secrecy grounds. Former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet signed off on the operation, but were not even put on trial.

This is not justice by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. Some low-level people got sentenced to prison, the higher-ups stay free. Some of them weren’t even put on trial because they ordered their subordinates to keep their mouths shut and take the fall. As the Americans will not go to Italy, the only people who will be punished are the two low-level Italians, who will go to prison, and former CIA officer Robert Seldon Lady, whose villa near Milan will be sold to compensate Nasr. Lady actually opposed the operation and was not that heavily involved in it.

As I blogged a while back, the rendition made no sense.

Update: Soctt Horton has more at Harpers. Unsurprisingly, everybody is going to appeal.

http://www.harpers.org/subjects/NoComment#hbc-90006031

Was Disgraced CIA Chief Involved in Al-Libi Rendition?

A few months ago, our day was illuminated by the news that the CIA’s chief of station in Algeria, Andrew Warren, was under investigation for a pair of date rapes. I did not pay the matter too much mind at the time, but have recently realized that Warren may have been involved in one of the defining events of the war on terror.

Reaction to Coleen Rowley on Real News Network: Where’s Wilshire?

The Real News Network recently carried an interview of former FBI lawyer Coleen Rowley by Paul Jay (part 1, part 2 and part 3), dealing with what it called the “unanswered questions about the lead up to 9/11.” Rowley was stationed at the bureau’s Minneapolis office during the Zacarias Moussaoui case in August and September 2001, but later became a whistleblower and left the organisation.

While many aspects of the interview are good and interesting, it leaves out what is probably the most important known fact about the Moussaoui case: the identity of the most senior FBI headquarters official involved fully involved in the case.

The Conventional Wisdom on the CIA’s Italian Job and Why It Might Be Wrong

One of the most famous CIA counterterrorist operations after 9/11 is the extraordinary rendition of Islamist extremist Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (a.k.a. “Abu Omar”) from Milan, Italy, to Egypt in 2003. Although it generated little publicity at the time, Abu Omar was later released in Egypt and called home. The Italian authorities intercepted the call, found he had been tortured, and started to investigate.

Moussaoui Trial Testimony Published

Thanks to the efforts of one of the people who comments on here, Noise, we have been able to obtain the testimony of Erik Rigler at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial. Rigler was a summary witness who described to the jury a chapter of the Justice Department’s inspector general’s report into the FBI’s pre-9/11 failings. The testimony concerned chapter 5 in the report, which detailed the problems with the 9/11 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.

The testimony was split over two days; you can find the first day here, and the second day here.

Some of the Moussaoui trial transcripts have been published around the web, mostly by Cryptome, but a lot of it is still missing, so we are happy to get this.

Those who are familiar with the issues here will not learn much new from the testimony, as it is only a summary of a chapter in a report that has been available to the public for a couple of years now. However, those who are not familiar with the issues might find it a good introduction.

Having said that, what I found most interesting was that Rigler did not summarise the declassified version of the report, but the classified version, which contains some really key points that don’t appear in the unclassified version (and is still unavailable, so you are getting a peek at what you are not supposed to know). These three points concern the badness of Tom Wilshire, the badness of Rodney Middleton and the badness of Dina Corsi (note: last two entries to be published soon).

Identity of CIA Officer Responsible for pre-9/11 Failures, Tora Bora Escape, Rendition to Torture Revealed

The name of the CIA officer who ran Alec Station, the agency’s bin Laden unit, in the run-up to 9/11 can be revealed. Known by a variety of aliases in the media until now, such as “Rich” in Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, “Richard” in the 9/11 Commission report and “Rich B” in George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm, his real name is Richard Blee.

Who Is the Mysterious CIA Interviewee?

One of the biggest pieces of news in the last couple of weeks has been the release of the CIA inspector general’s report into the usefulness, or rather lack thereof of its torture techniques. It has been practically everywhere, but one thing that has been lost is that there were a whole bunch of supporting documents released from the inspector general’s investigation. One of these caught my eye in particular.

It is a memorandum drafted by an inspector general employee about a 16 July 2003 interview of a female CIA officer who appears to be very involved in the agency’s rendition and torture programme.

Newly Discovered Document: CIA Station in Yemen Knew of Khallad Identification

A document recently found in the National Archives shows that the CIA station in Yemen knew that al-Qaeda leader and USS Cole bombing mastermind Khallad bin Attash had attended the organisation’s Kuala Lumpur summit. However, other information proves that the Yemen station never communicated this to the FBI, even though it was working closely with FBI investigators into the Cole bombing. This raises questions as to why the CIA station in Yemen failed to pass this information on and whether this failure was part of a wider agreement to withhold information from the bureau.

The document, found at the archives by History Commons contributor Erik Larson (a.k.a. paxvector) and uploaded to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd, is a set of comments by the CIA’s Office of General Counsel on a draft section of the 9/11 Commission’s staff statement 10, Threats and Responses in 2001.

Who Is This Guy?

A couple of months ago, Newsweek had an interview with former FBI agent Ali Soufan, who was involved in the USS Cole bombing investigation and was taken off detainee interrogations after 9/11 due to the detainees being tortured.

I found this passage, about an argument Soufan had with CIA officials and contractors about (not) torturing Abu Zubaida in Thailand, to be most interesting:

As Soufan tells the story, he challenged a CIA official at the scene about the agency’s legal authority to do what it was doing. “We’re the United States of America, and we don’t do that kind of thing,” he recalls shouting at one point. But the CIA official, whom Soufan refuses to name because the agent’s identity is still classified, brushed aside Soufan’s concerns. He told him in April 2002 that the aggressive techniques already had gotten approval from the “highest levels” in Washington, says Soufan. The official even waved a document in front of Soufan, saying the approvals “are coming from Gonzales,” a reference to Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel and later the attorney general. (A lawyer for Gonzales declined to comment.)