Italy pursues CIA "snatch squad".

The Italian government, once regarded as a key Bush administration ally in the "war on terror," is seeking to prosecute 13 suspected CIA operatives involved in the February 17, 2003 abduction of radical Muslim cleric Hussain Mustafa Omar Nasr in Milan. Citing Italian court documents, the June 26 London Guardian reported that Nasr "was bundled into the back of a van, driven to a U.S. airbase in the north of Italy and secretly flown to Egypt, where he was interrogated and tortured."

The "snatch squad" involved in this operation was hardly a model of operational discipline. "While most of the operatives used false identities, they left a long trail of paper and electronic records that enabled investigators to retrace their movements in detail," recounted the Washington Post. Staying at five-star hotels, the operatives made numerous calls on non-secure phone lines and otherwise indulged themselves, racking up $42,000 in expenses over a period of about three days. After Nasr was safely en route to Cairo, some of the operatives "rounded out their European trip with long weekends in Venice and Florence before leaving the country," noted the Post. Nice work, if you can get it.

Italian authorities are understandably outraged over the abduction, which was carried out on their territory without permission or notification. Additionally, observes the Guardian, the operation "disrupted [an Italian] investigation into [Nasr's] activities." The cleric is believed to have been trained in Bosnia--a UN-protected European haven for Islamic radicals.