Top Terrorist Could Win Damages Against CIA for Kidnapping, Italians Say

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Top Terrorist Could Win Damages Against CIA for Kidnapping, Italians Say
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor


MILAN, Italy — Armando Spataro has spent so much time in America that I half-expected him to greet me with a turkey drumstick when I visited him on Thanksgiving.

Here, in this cold and rainy northern industrial city, Nov. 22 was just another ordinary work day. Spataro, a motorcycle-riding, graying veteran of 33 years in the prosecutor’s office, had just wrapped up an interrogation of a suspected Islamic terrorist when I arrived. No waterboarding or even shouting. Just “a conversation,” he says, smiling coyly.

That’s just one of the things that separates him from U.S. counterterrorism practices.

But he “loves America,” he says. Indeed, icons of American art fill the walls of his cavernous office in the hulking Milan courthouse building, a model of 1930s-era fascist architecture. He has prints of Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell, among others, and a huge color photo of Lake Michigan, picked up on his frequent trips to the United States for conferences with his law-enforcement counterparts.

“This one is my favorite,” Spataro says, gesturing at the 1964 Rockwell print depicting a little black girl in a prim white dress being escorted to school by federal marshals in segregated New Orleans.

“You see,” he says in heavily accented English, “the faces here of the marshals, you cannot see them. It makes a point that justice has no face — it does not depend on who is in charge, or who is accused. The law is the law.”

It’s a theme Spataro has been required to repeat often over the past three years since he has pursued an investigation of 26 Americans — all but one of them CIA operatives — along with seven Italian security officials in connection with the disappearance of an al Qaeda suspect off a Milan street in February 2003.

It was a kidnapping by any other name, he says.

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