Washington Post, 26 Jan 10: Long before Osama bin Laden, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal, was the most famous terrorist of his era, bursting onto the scene with a spectacular hostage-taking of 11 OPEC oil ministers in 1975 and feeding his fame with more bloody attacks in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ramírez, described by the spy novelist Robert Ludlum as “the most dangerous man of all times,” has been the subject of numerous books and films over the past two decades, not all of them flattering. But apparently determined to control his image even from his Paris prison cell, he has brought suit against a French production company shooting a documentary film on his life and legend, demanding a say on the final cut. . . .
. . . .The Venezuelan-born Ramírez, now 60, was brought to justice after French police, acting on a U.S. tip, captured him in 1994 as he recovered from surgery in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. Bundled into a French government jet and secretly flown to Paris, he has been incarcerated ever since. Before his return, he had been sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the killings of two French internal security agents and their informant after they knocked on the door of his Paris hideout in 1975. A Paris appeals court ruled 16 months ago that he must also stand trial before a special anti-terrorism tribunal for a series of spectacular terrorism attacks in Paris in 1982 and 1983.
Ramírez carried out his attacks in the name of Palestinian liberation and against the established order. Although he has converted to Islam since his imprisonment, he fought for secular leftist ideals that are a far cry from the strict Salafist Islam that motivates al-Qaeda and most terrorism today. The son of a Communist-sympathizing Venezuelan lawyer, Ramírez was named after Lenin. In the early 1970s, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical group headed by George Habash that helped pioneer airline hijackings. As a member of the PFLP External Operations group, Ramírez and Palestinian accomplices kidnapped the OPEC ministers during a meeting in Vienna. Later that same year, according to French police, he tried to bring down an Israeli airliner by shooting a shoulder-fired rocket from the terrace of Orly Airport. . . .
A court in Italy announced guilty verdicts and jail terms for nearly two dozen CIA agents and an Air Force Colonel tried in absentia in connection with the 2003 arrest and rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar to his terrorist friends.
The “victim” at the center of the controversy, Abu Omar, is a member of al-Jemaah Islamiya organization (JI), an Egyptian terror group responsible for, among other things, the assassination of Anwar Sadat and the 1997 massacre of 59 dangerously non-Islamic tourists in Luxor, Egypt — including a five year old British boy who presented an imminent threat to their dreams of world domination.
The organization is allied with Al-Qaeda and is believed to still be actively plotting attacks against the Egyptian government and westerners, and also anyone who just happens to be within range when they start spraying bullets at their perceived enemies — like the four Japanese couples on honeymoons that they killed in the Luxor attack.
The incident that the trial results from occurred in February 2003, when CIA agents, working with Italian intelligence and secret service agents, arrested Abu Omar on the streets of Milan — where he had been hiding out in plain sight on a permanent vacation since he fled Egypt years earlier and sought asylum in Italy as part of an oppressed minority group: fanatical Imams who want to take over their homelands.
……It was clear soon after the case became public that the entire operation had been conducted with the assistance and permission of the Italian government. However, an anti-American prosecutor in Italy, Armando Spatari, egged on by an adoring crowd of onlookers in the press, decided to use the debacle to pursue his dream of indicting Americans connected to the so-called “so-called War on Terror.” Numerous CIA agents and military personnel, along with a token number of Italian officials were charged with kidnapping poor Abu Omar and sending him home.
Successive Italian central governments, both left wing and right wing, asked Spatari to halt the prosecution on the grounds that the Americans were acting with the knowledge, permission and direct assistance of Italian intelligence services.
……The high ranking Italians that gave permission for the operation — the only people the court had any real cause to punish — were set free, while numerous American CIA agents and others were sentenced to as much as eight years in prison. Several of the high ranking Americans had their sentences tossed by the judge, Oscar Magi, on diplomatic immunity or other technical grounds, but all the rank-and-file agents, as well as an Air Force officer, had their convictions left in place and were given five year prison terms. The judge also ordered the convicted agents to pay Abu Omar and his wife 1.5 million euros ($2.2 million) in damages. So now American CIA agents, working under orders, in a “friendly” country with the permission and material assistance of that nation’s government, have to worry about being arrested and imprisoned any time they leave the U.S. Read the rest
