Youtube Interview published on July 19, 2013 -
Ex-CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady was convicted in Italy for the February 2003 abduction of a terror suspect in the streets of Milan and sentenced to nine years in prison for his actions. This week Lady was detained in Panama at the request of Italian authorities, but on Friday the former agent was on a plane back to the United States. Col. Morris Davis, professor of law at Howard University, breaks down the case.
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Separately the following are excerpts from CounterPunch, Weekend Edition July 19-21, 2013. CounterPunch is rather left leaning but the article has more merit than the title suggests http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/19/panama-nails-a-cia-torture-capo/ :
Panama Nails a CIA Torture Capo: Sticking It to the Yankee Imperialists
"...By most accounts, Lady thought the kidnapping was a dumb idea and told Castelli as much. He apparently argued that it was unnecessary because of the Italians’ fine surveillance and that it would hurt the CIA’s very productive relationship with the Italians if the Italians learned that the CIA double-crossed them. (He was right.) ...The case opened up for Spataro when his investigators stumbled on the CIA’s embarrassingly slapdash tradecraft. The most ridiculous of the CIA’s idiocies was the way they recklessly used cell phones—making hundreds of calls to one another in the months before the kidnapping and, in doing so, leaving hundreds of traces of their locations with cell-phone providers. (Had they used satellite phones, they could never have been traced.) On the day of the kidnapping, as they coordinated their movements with Abu Omar’s walk to his mosque, they made scores of calls to one another that reached a dizzying crescendo. Spataro and his investigators examined all of the calls made by the thousands of cell phones that were connected to cell towers near the kidnapping site. Then they sorted out which phones made several short calls to each other in the minutes before the abduction, as a kidnapping team that was stalking its prey would do. They then looked at which of those phones had also called Bob Lady’s cell phone or the US consulate in Milan or an unlisted number in Langley or some other telltale number linked to the CIA.
When they found a phone that they were pretty sure belonged to the kidnappers, they tracked its movements over the previous months, which led to further discoveries. For example, they located the hotels that many of the kidnappers stayed in and turned up the hotels’ copies of their passports and driver’s licenses. A few of the kidnappers carelessly traveled under their real names or under names so close to their real ones that there was hardly a difference. The identities of a couple of the kidnappers were tracked down through—get this—their frequent-flyer numbers, which they had given to hotels and rental car agencies to rack up miles. Evidently they thought Abu Omar shouldn’t be the only one to get a free trip out of the job" See full article.
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Pete