I’m feeling too crappy to concentrate on fleshing this story out. Maybe some people in the BT Community can put it all together, because it all traces right back to Bush, Cheney, Hadley, Scooter Libby, the CIA, and the NSA programs. Oh…and also the Milan extraordinary rendition case that led to the arrest warrants of 26 CIA operatives.
A FORMER Italian spy chief was arrested overnight on suspicion of involvement in an illegal espionage ring that prosecutors believe snooped on Italy’s elite, including Prime Minister Romano Prodi.
Marco Mancini, once the head of counter-espionage at Italy’s SISMI military intelligence agency, already faces possible indictment on separate charges of helping the US Central Intelligence Agency kidnap a Muslim cleric in Milan.
Prosecutors suspect the illegal spy group was led by the former security chief at telecoms firm Telecom Italia, Giuliano Tavaroli. They believe it illegally gathered sensitive data from telephone records of leading Italian personalities.
Targets included Mr Prodi when he was European Commission president in 2001, as well as financier Emilio Gnutti and soccer player Bobo Vieri, the source said.
Mr Mancini’s lawyers protested against his arrest, ordered by Judge Giuseppe Gennari to prevent evidence tampering. It was not clear what his suspected role was with the group.
Tavaroli, the main suspect, has been in prison since September as part of the same investigation.
A good place to start looking for information is in this July 2006 Alternet story. Here’s a teaser:
There’s a covert, illegal, parallel American-Italian intelligence structure operating out there. Rogue spymasters like Robert Lady, the CIA’s “retired” station head in Milan, and Marco Mancini, until recently number two at SISMI, the Italian CIA, are two of its now-exposed operatives. They worked within a web spun by President Bush and Silvio Berlusconi. Big B and little b huddled together for an overnight retreat in Crawford in late July 2003. At the time, Berlusconi was prime minister of Italy, and he remains today that country’s richest man.
Their webs of intrigue connect: the forged yellowcake dossier used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq, the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects to countries where they would be tortured, and the payback to the Italians via a contract to build 23 Marine Ones, the president’s helicopter fleet.
I’d look, also, for any links between Marco Mancini and Michael Ledeen.
