RenditionsItaly pardons ex-CIA operative for 2003 rendition in Rome

Sabrina de Sousa, a former CIA officer who faced the prospect of becoming the first intelligence official to be sent to prison for being involved in rendition of terrorists as part of President George W Bush’s War on Terror, has been granted a last-minute pardon by Italy.

De Sousa was convicted in absentia in 2009 for taking part in the rendition of a radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar. Abu Omar is to be extradited by Egypt to Italy this week to serve a four-year sentence there.

CBS News reports that the office of Sergio Mattarella, the Italian president, said on Tuesday that De Sousa had been granted a partial pardon, which would reduce her four-year sentence of detention by one year. The statement said that De Sousa would be able to serve her sentence with “alternative measures” to detention, meaning that she could avoid spending any time in jail.

De Sousa is a dual U.S. and Portuguese citizen, and it is not clear yet whether she would have to remain in Italy to serve the sentence.

Mattarella’s office said the act of mercy reflected both De Sousa’s “attitude” — she actively sought clemency –and the fact that the United States had “interrupted” the Bush-era practice of renditions, under which U.S. intelligence operatives kidnapped terrorism suspects and taken them to black sites in several countries, where they were interrogated – and, in many cases, tortured.

De Sousa, 61, had been under house arrest in Portugal since 2015, after she left the United States to visit her family in Portugal. She made the decision even though she was the subject of a European arrest warrant.

Last week, after more than a year of legal skirmishes, De Sousa was taken into custody by Portuguese police, and was expected to be flown to Italy this week.

De Sousa is one of more than a dozen CIA operatives who, since 2009, have been convicted in absentia for their role the kidnapping of Omar.

In recent years, De Sousa, who described herself as a low-level operatives who was made a scapegoat, has become a critic of the U.S. rendition program – and of the U.S. government which, she claimed, had not done enough to defend her.

The case against De Sousa and the other CIA officers was brought by an independent Italian prosecutor who investigated the rendition and who was able, using forensic tools, to document the U.S. involvement in Omar’s kidnapping. The case, however, has never been backed by the Italian government, which had made a point not to seek De Sousa’s extradition from the United States or Portugal. The Italian government has also not sought the extradition of the other CIA operatives involved in the kidnapping.

In an interview with McClatchy in 2013, De Sousa said that the former CIA station chief in Rome, Jeffrey Castelli, had exaggerated the importance of Omar as a terrorist mastermind in order to gain approval from then-CIA director George Tenet for the rendition.