In 2003, Abu Omar,¹ an Egyptian political refugee in Milan, was abducted by the CIA. He was secretly flown out of Italy to Egypt as a suspected terrorist. Readers of Nerikes Allehanda surely remember a similar case involving two Egyptian asylumseekers in Sweden. In 2001, abiding by a CIA request, Swedish authorities secretly deported Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery² to Egypt where both men were reportedly tortured. In 2004, Agiza was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a military court for his connections with Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda. al-Zery was released from prison in 2003.

Italian prosecutors have now opened a trial into the Abu Omar case. 25 CIA agents, one US Air Force colonel and at least six senior officials of the Italian secret service have been indicted for approving, masterminding and carrying out the kidnapping plan. The US government has said it will not extradite the American suspects.

On May 14 [2008], Ghali Nabila, Abu Omar’s wife, appeared before the court to describe how her husband was kidnapped and sent to Egypt, his torture and imprisonment. According to a report in the International Herald Tribune: Nabila described her shock at seeing Abu Omar in Alexandria, Egypt, during one brief respite from Egyptian prison in October 2004.

“I found him wasted, skinny — so skinny his hair had turned white, he had a hearing aid,” she said. Nabila at first rebuffed prosecutors’ requests to describe the torture her husband had recounted, saying she didn’t want to talk about it. Advised by prosecutors that she had no choice, she tearfully proceeded, “He was tied up like he was being crucified. He was beaten up, especially around his ears. He was subject to electroshocks to many body parts.” “To his genitals?” the prosecutors asked. “Yes,” she replied.³

Extraordinary rendition — the practice of transporting suspected terrorists or other individuals to third countries for interrogation and imprisonment — is practically an euphemism for torture by proxy. Omar, Agiza or al-Zery, all victims of this bizarre torture game, could have become characters in Franz Kafka’s nightmares. And if Kafka wrote a novel today, it could have been the latest Human Rights Watch report: “Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan,” a 36-page investigation that documents how Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID) secretly detained, interrogated, and tortured at least 14 non-Jordanians on behalf of the CIA from 2001 until 2004. Many of these individuals later landed in the prison cells of Guantanamo.⁴

Joanne Mariner, author of the report, tells me, “President George W Bush declared a global war on terror… and the CIA is a truly global player. This truly is an international phenomenon: individuals from about 40 different countries have been detained and flown to a whole lot of other countries…”

With Kafka dead years back, what we now have is the globalization of torture. In a globalized world, even torture do not have any national boundaries. In a Kafkaesque world divided between terrorists and torturers, since fact has undoubtedly become stranger than the fiction, a report in International Herald Tribune or an investigation by Human Rights Watch can now easily substitute a bizarre novel.

1. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hassan_mustafa_osama_nasr
2. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ahmed_agiza_and_muhammad_al-zery
3. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/14/europe/italy.php
4. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/jordan0408