The Spies Who Came In from the Hot Tub

Like so much else in our moment, it contravened laws the U.S. had once signed onto, pretzeled the English language, went directly to the darkside, was connected to various administration lies and manipulations that preceded the invasion of Iraq, and was based on taking the American taxpayer to the cleaners.

I'm talking about a now-notorious Bush administration "extraordinary rendition" in Italy, the secret kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan in early 2003, his transport via U.S. airbases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, and there, evidently with the CIA station chief for Italy riding shotgun, directly into the hands of Egyptian torturers. This was but one of an unknown number of extraordinary-rendition operations -- the estimate is more than 100 since September 11, 2001, but no one really knows -- that have been conducted all over the world and have delivered terror suspects into the custody of Uzbeki, Syrian, Egyptian, and other hands notorious for their use of torture. It just so happens that this operation took place on the democratic soil of an ally that possessed an independent judiciary, and that the team of 19 or more participants, some speaking fluent Italian, passed through that country not like the undercover agents of our imagination, but, as former CIA clandestine officer Melissa Boyle Mahle told Reuters, "like elephants stampeding through Milan. They left huge footprints."

Those gargantuan footprints -- and some good detective work by the Italian police based on unsecured cell phones (evidently from a batch issued to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Rome), hotel bills, credit card receipts, and the like -- have given us a glimpse into the unexpectedly extravagant "shadow war" being conducted on our behalf by the Bush administration through the Central Intelligence Agency. So let me skip the normal discussions of kidnappings, torture, or whether we violated Italian sovereignty, and just concentrate on what those footprints revealed. If the President's Global War on Terror has been saddled with the inelegant acronym GWOT, the Italian rendition operation should perhaps be given the acronym LDVWOT or La Dolce Vita War on Terror.

Of course, if Vice President Dick Cheney could say of administration tax cuts, "We won the [2002] midterms. This is our due"; if House Majority Leader Tom DeLay could charge his transatlantic airfare to Great Britain on an American Express card issued to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and food and phone calls at a Scottish golf-course hotel on a credit card issued to Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham; if Halliburton could slip a reputed $813 million extra in "costs" into a contract to provide logistical support for U.S. troops (including "$152,000 in 'movie library costs' [and] a $1.5 million tailoring bill"); then why shouldn't the Spartan warriors of the intelligence community capture a few taxpayer bucks while preparing a kidnapping in Italy?

Here's what we know at present about this particular version of La Dolce Vita:

• The CIA agents took rooms in Milan's 5-star hotels, including the Principe di Savoia ("one of the world's most luxuriously appointed hotels") where they rang up $42,000 in expenses; the Westin Palace, the Milan Hilton, and the Star Hotel Rosa as well as similar places in the seaside resort of La Spezia and in Florence, running up cumulative hotel bills of $144,984.
• They ate in the equivalent of 5-star restaurants in Milan and elsewhere, evidently fancying themselves gourmet undercover agents.
• As a mixed team -- at least 6 women took part in the operation -- men and women on at least two occasions took double rooms together in these hotels. (There is no indication that any of them were married -- to each other at least.)
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