From an American vantage point, Abu Omar is not a sympathetic figure. The radical Egyptian-born Muslim cleric not only preached jihad but practiced it in Bosnia and Afghanistan. By early 2003, living in Italy, he was allegedly encouraging others to go to Iraq to fight the United States in the coming war. So it’s no surprise that he would attract the attention of the CIA.
But his case shows how legitimate concerns about terrorism can provoke inexcusable overreactions. In Feburary, 2003, Omar was abducted by the CIA in Milan and flown to Cairo, where he was turned over to Egyptian security forces. What happened next, at least by his account, was perfectly predictable: He was beaten, tortured and sexually abused.
Under the Bush administration’s policy of “extraordinary rendition,” American agents capture suspected terrorists and transfer them to the custody of governments that are known to use cruel methods to extract information. In this way, the U.S. government gets any intelligence obtained through such techniques, but without having to use brutality itself. Critics call this approach “outsourcing torture.”
That policy has begun to bite back. Italian prosecutors have charged 25 current and former CIA employees and an Air Force officer with illegally abducting Omar, who remains in prison in Egypt, even though courts there have dismissed charges against him for lack of evidence. The Americans are not expected to return to Italy for the trial, but the case remains an embarrassment to both the U.S. and Italian governments.
Given Omar’s record, it would have been crazy to ignore him. But there were other ways of dealing with any threat he may have presented. At the time he was seized, he was under wall-to-wall electronic surveillance. As a senior Italian law enforcement official told Tribune reporter John Crewdson, “We knew everything, everything, everything Abu Omar was up to.” Italian officials told the Tribune they found no evidence he was plotting violence.
If that monitoring wasn’t sufficient, the U.S. could have asked the Italians to file charges and arrest him. (In April, 2005, he was charged with helping jihadists go to Iraq.) At worst, the CIA could have captured him and sent him to Guantanamo Bay, rather than give him to a regime it regularly criticizes for abusing detainees.
The administration policy is that it transfers prisoners to the custody of other governments only on the assurance that they won’t be tortured. Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales, however, has said that such renditions are allowed unless the prisoner is “more likely than not” to be tortured. In practice, that often means turning a blind eye to barbaric practices.
But if the U.S. renounces the use of torture by its own agents, it shouldn’t be an accomplice in torture committed by other governments. Omar is a bad guy. But bad guys shouldn’t induce us to embrace unconscionable policies.
