An Italian judge ruled to processed with the trial of US and Italian spies accused of kidnapping an Egyptian imam in 2003. The Milan judge rejected a defense request to lift arrest warrants against the 26 Americans, most of whom are believed to be CIA agents, despite some of the evidence being made inadmissible by state secrecy rules. The US agents and seven Italians are accused of abducting Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr in Milan and flying him to Egypt. Nasr said that he was tortured under questioning and held for years without charges. The decision to go ahead with the trial comes while the United Stats is debating the acceptability of harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, and whether to prosecute the officials responsible for advocating the use of torture. The US government has refused to extradite the 26 spies in the Italian case.
This article concerning the CIA rendition trial has a history of being stalled and re-started again, as the different parties involved state and argue for their different stakes in this security trial. This story highlights the complicated entanglements that ma arise in international, cross-country terror trials and proceedings, in which the chief aim is not about evidence for a particular accused terrorist or terrorism plan, but different and overlapping stakes of security, secrecy, and legality across sovereign borders.
