Shadowland: The Road to Rendition

Via Guerzoni is a quiet street on the outskirts of Milan in a former industrial neighborhood that is somewhere between decrepitude and redevelopment. High walls line both sides of the road for about 100 yards as it runs between a park and a half-abandoned plant nursery. If you're in the business of making people disappear--call it kidnapping or maybe counterterrorism or, in the Bushian jargon of the moment, "rendition"--then Via Guerzoni is a good venue. Few people are around, and many of those are Muslim immigrants who want as little to do with the police as they can.

So whoever snatched an Egyptian-born imam known as Abu Omar off Via Guerzoni in broad daylight on Feb. 17, 2003, had planned well. And if their tradecraft had been a little bit better, the incident could have been kept very quiet and forgotten quickly. But they screwed up, and soon, possibly as early as next week, you can look for the abduction of Abu Omar to emerge as a major embarrassment to President George W. Bush and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The fiercely independent judiciary in Milan, led by investigating magistrate Armando Spataro, has prepared a case and expects to issue warrants alleging that a dozen or more foreign agents, some of them reportedly Americans, were involved in the abduction of Abu Omar. They are supposed to have driven him in the truck to the U.S. airbase at Aviano, Italy, then flown him to Cairo. In Egypt, as the saying goes, "they have ways of making you talk."

Since Italian reporter Carlo Bonini first broke the story of this investigation in the Rome daily La Repubblica last February, U.S. officials have been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Spokesmen at the U.S. consulate in Milan and the U.S. Embassy in Rome said they were unable to comment on any of the substantive questions, and they believed no official requests for information have been received from the Italian government. That will change if and when the arrest warrants are issued.

Now that the second-term Bush administration is advocating democracy and the rule of law around the world, its own lawless ways during the first term are an embarrassment. What's been called, with a bit of hyperbole, the Guantanamo gulag has become a liability. So are ongoing revelations about the practice of "renditions": sending suspected terrorists to countries with even fewer scruples about interrogation practices than the Bush administration. ("Outsourcing torture" is the catch phrase used by human-rights activists in Italy and elsewhere.)