
The Italian Job
Abu Omar, a radical cleric living in Milan, is snatched off an Italian street in 2003 by CIA operatives and flown to Egypt for interrogation, a rendition so brazen that Italian prosecutors eventually charge 22 CIA officers and an Air Force colonel over it. VICE News tracks down Sabrina De Sousa, one of those officers, convicted in absentia in 2009 despite insisting she had no role in the abduction, and interviews her in Lisbon as she works to clear her name a decade later. The film lays out why this case stands alone: of the more than 100 renditions carried out with the help of dozens of governments after September 11, it is the only one that ever produced a criminal prosecution. De Sousa describes life under an Italian conviction she cannot appeal in person, unable to travel freely and unsure which countries might honor an extradition request. Other figures connected to the case add their accounts, and the CIA's silence on her defense becomes part of the story itself, a bureaucracy declining to explain what happened to one of its own.