Exclusive: I Was Kidnapped by the CIA

NEWS: Inside the CIA's extraordinary rendition program ­and the bungled abduction of would-be terrorists

By Peter Bergen
Illustration (Map of CIA Rendition Flights): Trevor Paglen and John Emerson

March/April 2008 Issue

TOOLS E-mail article Print article BACKTALK E-mail the editor RELATED ARTICLES Disappearing Act: Rendition by the Numbers

For hours, the words come pouring out of Abu Omar as he describes his years of torture at the hands of Egypt's security services. Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped. He mentions, almost casually, the hearing loss in his left ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming, takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has unspecified "problems with my wife at home." He is, in short, a broken man.

There is nothing particularly unusual about Abu Omar's story. Torture is a standard investigative technique of Egypt's intelligence services and police, as the State Department and human rights organizations have documented myriad times over the years. What is somewhat unusual is that Abu Omar ended up inside Egypt's torture chambers courtesy of the United States, via an "extraordinary rendition"—in this case, a spectacular daylight kidnapping by the Central Intelligence Agency on the streets of Milan, Italy.

First introduced during the Clinton administration, extraordinary renditions—in which suspected terrorists are turned over to countries known to use torture, usually for the purpose of extracting information from them—have been one of the cia's most controversial tools in the war on terror. According to legal experts, the practice has no justification in United States law and flagrantly violates the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty that Congress ratified in 1994. Nonetheless, Congress and the American courts have essentially ignored the practice, and the Bush administration has insisted that it has never knowingly sent anyone to a place where he will be tortured.

But Abu Omar's case is unique: Unlike any other rendition case, it has prompted a massive criminal investigation—though not in the United States. An Italian prosecutor has launched a probe of the kidnapping, resulting in the indictment of 26 American officials, almost all of them suspected cia agents. It has also generated a treasure trove of documents on the secretive rendition program, including thousands of pages of court filings that detail how it actually works. Late last year, I traveled to Milan to review those documents and to Egypt, where Abu Omar now lives. What I found was a remarkable tale of cia overreach and its consequences—a tale that could represent the beginning of a global legal backlash against the war on terror.

An avuncular, portly man in his mid-40s clad in a turban and a floor-length blue robe, Abu Omar met me at a corner store near his home, the first time he had agreed to talk to an American magazine reporter. He took me to his tidy, cramped apartment near Alexandria's run-down Victorian rail station. The walls were bare other than some religious calligraphy. The screen saver on his computer was a picture of Mecca.

Abu Omar, whose full name is Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, served me pungent coffee and sugary biscuits prepared by his unseen wife. Then, leaning forward in a massive gilded chair, he told me how in the weeks before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he'd felt he was being watched and followed as he walked the streets of Milan, where he'd been granted political asylum in 2001 following an earlier spell of imprisonment and torture in Egypt. A member of Egypt's militant Islamic Group and a part-time cleric, he had been waging a public campaign against the impending war; Italian authorities had been investigating his circle of acquaintances since mid-2002 and believed he might have been recruiting fighters to go to Iraq, a charge he denies.

A little before noon on February 17, 2003, Abu Omar was headed to his mosque, incongruously located inside a garage. He strolled down Via Guerzoni, a quiet street mostly empty of businesses and lined with high, view-blocking walls. A red Fiat pulled up beside him and a man jumped out, shouting "Polizia! Polizia!" Abu Omar produced his ID. "Suddenly I was lifted in the air," he recalled. He was dragged into a white van and beaten, he said, by wordless men wearing balaclavas. After trussing him with restraints and blindfolding him, they sped away.

Hours later, when the van stopped, Abu Omar heard airplane noise. His clothes were cut off and something was stuffed in his anus, likely a tranquilizing suppository. His head was entirely covered in tape with only small holes for his mouth and nose, and he was placed on a plane. Hours later he was hustled off the jet. He heard someone speaking Arabic in a familiar cadence; in the distance, a muezzin was calling the dawn prayer. After more than a decade in exile, he was back in Egypt.

Abu Omar was taken into a building, put in a blue prison suit, freshly blindfolded, and presented to someone described as an important pasha, or government official. The pasha said he'd be released if he'd go back to Italy to spy on the militants at his mosque. He said no.

And so began Abu Omar's descent into one of the 21st century's nastier circles of hell. His cell had no lights or windows, and the temperature alternated between freezing and baking. He was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for seven months. Interrogations could come at any time of the day or night. He was beaten with fists, electric cables, and chairs, stripped naked, and given electric shocks.

His tormentors' questions largely revolved around his circle of Islamists in Italy, though every now and again they'd indicate that they knew he wasn't a big-time terrorist. They were detaining him only because "the Americans imposed you on us." When he asked, "Why, then, do you abuse me so much?" they replied, "This is our family tradition."

In the fall of 2003, Abu Omar was taken to another prison; it was here that he was crucified and raped by the guards. After seven more months of torture, a Cairo court found there was no evidence that Abu Omar was involved in terrorism and ordered him freed. He was told not to contact anyone in Italy—including his wife—and not to speak to the press or human rights groups. Above all, he was not to tell anyone what had happened.

After agreeing to the conditions, he was deposited at his mother's home in Alexandria. He promptly called his wife in Italy. It was the first time she'd heard from him in 14 months. Italian investigators, who'd been monitoring Abu Omar's phone in Milan for years, recorded the call. His wife asked him how he had been treated. He told her sarcastically, "They brought me food from the fanciest restaurant," though nearly three weeks later, he admitted to her, "I was very close to dying." He also spoke with a friend in Milan, Mohamed Reda El Badry, whose phone was also being tapped by Italian investigators. "I was freed on health grounds," he told El Badry in one of the recorded calls. "I was almost paralyzed; still today I cannot walk more than 200 yards.... I was incontinent, suffered from kidney trouble."

And then, just as suddenly as Abu Omar had reappeared, he vanished again. Egyptian authorities had gotten wind of his calls to Italy. This time he was imprisoned for three years. He smuggled out a letter describing his ordeal, which found its way to the Arab and Italian press and international human rights organizations. Inevitably, that led to more torture.

Was it illegal for American officials to send Abu Omar to Egypt? Yes, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which prohibits delivering someone to a country where there are "substantial grounds" to assume that he might be tortured. Were there substantial grounds to believe that transferring Abu Omar to Egypt would result in his being tortured? Plenty, according to a State Department report that detailed the methods used by Egypt's security services during the year that Abu Omar was abducted and confined, including stripping and blindfolding prisoners; dousing them with cold water; beatings with fists, whips, metal rods, and other objects; administering electric shocks; suspending prisoners by their arms; and sexual assault and threats of rape.

The White House has routinely claimed that when the United States renders individuals to other countries it receives assurances that, as President Bush stated at a press conference in March 2005, "they won't be tortured...This country does not believe in torture." Several months later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reiterated, "The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured."

But in the case of Abu Omar, Rice's assertions are demonstrably false. According to a previously unpublished study conducted by Katherine Tiedemann of The New America Foundation and myself, the same is true of many of the extraordinary renditions going back to the program's beginnings in 1995. (See "Rendition by the Numbers," above.) Fourteen documented extraordinary renditions took place under the Clinton administration. Almost all of those prisoners were rendered to Egypt, where at least three were executed. After 9/11 the pace of renditions sped up and the program expanded dramatically. Prisoners were now also transferred to Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and even Libya, Sudan, and Syria. In all, we found 53 documented cases of extraordinary rendition since September 2001; only one prisoner specifically said he had not been tortured. Of the sixteen men who have been released, eight claimed they were tortured and/or mistreated while in foreign custody; one died within weeks of being released. Nineteen of the rendered men have not been heard from since they disappeared.

Brad Garrett is a former fbi special agent who obtained uncoerced confessions from two of the most high-profile terrorists in recent American history: Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and Mir Aimal Kasi, who shot and killed two cia employees outside the Agency's headquarters the same year. "The whole idea that you would send anyone to some other country to obtain the intel you want is ludicrous," he told me in an email. "If we want the intel, there are approaches that will render the information without torture. The problem is that someone in the U.S. government is convinced that torture is the way to go, and so if we are not allowed to do it, then send them to someplace where torture is sanctioned."

The extraordinary rendition program was not primarily intended to yield information, according to Michael Scheuer, the cia official whom the Clinton White House tasked with implementing it. "It came from an improvisation to dismantle these terrorist cells overseas. We wanted to get suspects off the streets and grab their papers," Scheuer explains. "The interrogation part wasn't important." He also claims that the program was overseen by congressional committees and "was lawyered to death." After 9/11, "The White House was desperate," Scheuer says. The rendition program quickly expanded because holding any but the most important Al Qaeda prisoners was a "burdensome proposition" for the Agency.

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