The name Sabrina De Sousa may not ring a bell with you. And why should it? De Sousa, after all, was a CIA agent who, like all her colleagues, would’ve gone to lunatic extremes to hide her identity, not to mention what she did for a living.
De Sousa, a naturalised Portuguese American, was one of 22 CIA operatives accused by the Italian government of masterminding the abduction in 2003 of an Egyptian cleric living in Italy, known as Abu Omar, and of orchestrating his rendition to Egypt, where he was incarcerated for four years, before being allowed to return to his family in Milan. In 2005, an Italian judge, Guido Salvini, issued warrants for the arrest of all 22 suspects said to have carried out the kidnapping.
Salvini had concluded that there was enough probable cause that the operatives had “violated Italian sovereignty and international law”, and ordered Italy’s Justice Ministry to seek their extradition, after it was revealed that they had fled back to the United States. There they found it prudent to lie low, avoiding travel anywhere in Europe. Not De Sousa, though, who had family in Portugal and foolishly chose to move there, where she was promptly apprehended last October. Her extradition to Italy, where she had already been sentenced in absentia to four years in prison, may take place as early as May 4.
So why dredge up this case at this time, thus invoking a sad chapter in recent American history, known as Extraordinary Rendition — euphemism for US-sponsored abduction and extra-judicial transfer of terrorist suspects from one country to another, or to their detention in those dreaded, CIA-run “black sites”, where they would be interrogated out of sight, out of mind?
Shouldn’t all this be behind us now? No it should not, if for no reason other than the fact that the US has to date refused to acknowledge guilt, compensate the victims — a great many of whom later were shown to have been innocent — or hold accountable those responsible for the programme and its abuses, abuses that, under the moniker “enhanced interrogation techniques” that facilitated gruesome forms of torture, included waterboarding, sleep deprivation and electric shock.
For nations, as for individuals, a time always comes when they recognise, often in the cold light of hindsight, how dark this dark side in their history is, how its darkness always gnaws away at their collective memory, like a raw wound. That’s when guilt kicks in — but only after the fact.
Consider, as a case in point, the internment of Japanese Americans — all 120,000 of them — in prison camps during the Second World War, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself in 1942 ordering the incarceration, and with the Supreme Court of the US ruling 6 to 3 to go along, thus pandering to base passions in the national mood.
But nations, I say, like individuals, come to their senses, if at times belatedly. In 1980, for example, the then US president Jimmy Carter appointed a commission tasked with determining the truth. The commission’s report, fittingly titled ‘Personal Justice Denied’, found little evidence of Japanese Americans’ disloyalty, the putative cause of their incarceration and concluded that the internment had been the product of racism, recommending that the government pay reparations to the survivors. In 1988, the then US president Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, effectively an act of contrition by the government, and authorised a payment of $20,000 (Dh73,560) to each individual survivor.
And lest we forget, there is that other equally sad chapter in modern American history, known generically as the McCarthy era, named after the opportunistic Joe McCarthy, a US Senator from Wisconsin, who has given the lexicon the term McCarthyism — used to refer to demagogic, reckless and unsubstantiated accusations. Americans today, across the board, recognise that era in the 1950s — a time of national fear, even hysteria, over the perceived threat of “international Communism” — as a shameful episode in their modern history, an era defined by widespread abuse of power, when thousands of intellectuals, journalists, social critics, filmmakers, academics, writers and even diplomats, were accused of being Communists or Communist sympathisers, summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on the Hill, investigated, libelled, blacklisted and effectively prevented from earning a living.
It was an era defined by innumerable tales of hardship suffered by political naifs, often mere left-leaning liberal democrats, whose jobs were lost, careers destroyed and families broken up. Today, Joe McCarthy is universally identified for the demagogue that he was, satirised — for what else would you do with the legacy of a man like that? — in plays like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and films like George Clooney’s black and white Goodnight and Good Luck and Woody Allen’s comedy-drama The Front.
Every “war” in this case is tagged with excesses — the war on Communist subversion, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on the ‘other’, whether that ‘other’ is Japanese-American, Muslim-American, African-American or Mexican-American. But unless we admit to these excesses, if only in hindsight, our moral compass becomes difficult to decipher, as mute to ordinary men and women are the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb.
Perhaps the day will come, and soon, when the US will recognise extraordinary rendition for what it was: A stain on its human rights record, not to mention on its standing abroad.
As for Sabrina De Sousa, who, true to her last name — which, in Portuguese, means ‘to go back on a confirmed arrangement or agreement’ — opted to defy the odds by recklessly travelling back to Europe — instead of staying put in the US, which is what she had promised her colleagues to do — will be flown to Italy, perhaps in handcuffs, to serve her time behind bars and have her comeuppance.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.