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CIA employees face legal, career trouble over terrorist renditions
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Some old intelligence scandals and foul-ups seem to keep turning back up to take a toll on government employees here in Washington.
Take metro Washington resident Sabrina DeSousa, for example, whose case Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly reported several weeks ago. Italian authorities charged DeSousa with participating in the CIA kidnapping of Islamic Cleric and Al Qaeda small fry Abu Omar from a Milan street in 2003.
DeSousa, a foreign service officer, denies that she is a CIA employee (although New York Times sources and investigative reporter Matthew Cole maintain that she is a CIA officer) or was involved in the Abu Omar abduction. However, the Italian kidnapping case has effectively stalled her career because an Italian arrest warrant prevents her from traveling out of the US. The State Department even revoked her black diplomatic passport.
DeSousa is now suing to force the State Department to invoke diplomatic immunity and thus forestall her prosecution in Italy. She told CQ that she feels the US government has turned its back on her after decades of faithful service.
For CIA watchers, DeSousa's case is hardly unique or surprising. CQ's Stein and Matthew Cole have reported in GQ previously on the legal travails of other CIA officers involved in the now-notorious Abu Omar kidnapping in Italy. CIA routinely advises its officers and contractors to obtain so-called professional liability insurance, in a back-handed acknowledgment that the agency doesn't always have its employees' backs.
The agency reportedly suffers a shortage of experienced, qualified officers who can speak foreign languages and do tough overseas duty.
CIA’s web site even advertises vacancies for so-called “Core Collector” candidates to “serve on the front lines of human intelligence collection overseas.” But how is a pattern of leaving frontline officers to the wolves going to help this beleaguered agency recruit a a new generation of American spies?
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