Italian police testifying in the Abu Omar abduction trial in Milan, Italy yesterday named four Americans as their CIA contacts.

"The prosecutors questioned 12 witnesses, all members of the Milan Counterterrorism Police and the Milan Carabinieri Special Branch," said an official involved in the case, on condition of anonymity. 

The police named Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA's former Milan base chief, Jeffrey W. Castelli, the agency's former Rome station chief, and two others, identified as Sabrina De Sousa and Betnie Medero, as their CIA contacts, according to the source. All had previously been named in prosecution documents.

The CIA declined to comment. 

Ever since I attended a conference on homeland security in Paris four years ago, I've been fascinated by how little the French, Italians, Germans and other continentals seem to worry about violations of their civil rights by their spy agencies.

Outside the United Kingdom, which invented civil liberties with the Magna Carta 993 years ago last Sunday, ordinary Europeans by and large couldn't care less about wiretapping, national ID cards and police spies in mosques, all of which have millions of Americans, not to mention the ACLU and libertarian Rep. Ron Paul , R-Texas, up in arms.

As I reported Friday in my regular SpyTalk column, two leading European judicial figures with vast experience in terrorism cases, French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, and Italy's Armando Spataro, the Milan prosecutor who has put al Qaeda operatives, mafiosi, Marxist terrorists and CIA operatives alike on trial, agree. But readers are already fine-tuning, to put it kindly, my arguments, which you can find at the bottom of the column.

All in all, It's a fine beginning for the SpyTalk blog. Stir it up.