An Air Force lawyer has told Italy to lay off Col. Joseph L. Romano III, an officer caught up in a CIA counterterrorism kidnapping case.

Romano is one of 26 Americans being tried in absentia by Italy on kidnapping charges in connection with the abduction of an Al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar, in Feb. 2003.

According to charging papers and Italy's indictment, Romano helped a CIA "rendition" team spirit Omar out of Italy through the Aviano air base, after he had been snatched off a Milan street. All the rest of the defendants are alleged to be CIA operatives.

"The decision (to file the motion) was approved by the Secretary of Defense," a Pentagon spokesman said.

Sabrina DeSousa, an alleged CIA agent charged with kidnapping in Italy, says that a Justice Department decision to pay her legal costs is much too little, much too late.

"Unbelievable!  The United States Department of Justice just 'approved' an attorney to defend me, a month after the trial ended, knowing full well that an attorney at this stage will make little or no difference to the outcome or verdict," DeSousa said via e-mail Friday.

The lawyer for a defendant in the trial of more than two dozen CIA operatives charged with kidnapping in Italy is trying to stir up interest in his client's plight just as President Obama arrives in Rome for a G8 summit meeting of the world's industrialized nations.

Mark Zaid represents Sabrina Desousa, who was listed as a diplomat at the American embassy in Rome and U.S. consulate in Milan at the time of the 2003 kidnapping of an al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar.

Sabrina DeSousa is as cool as you'd expect a CIA operative to be in a hot spot.

DeSousa's predicament is that she's wanted on kidnapping charges in Italy, along with two dozen other Americans connected to the CIA's "rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect from a Milan street to an Egyptian torture chamber in 2003.

Three years later, Italian authorities monitoring the missing man's home phone broke open the case, eventually filing kidnapping charges against DeSousa and the others, all but one CIA undercover operatives.

In spy-speak, it's called maintaining your cover.

Italy's former spy chief, on trial for participating with the CIA in the abduction of a Muslim cleric, says he wants Condoleezza Rice to testify in the case.

Niccolo Pollari, former head of the Italian military intelligence service SISMI, and eight other Italians participated in the 2003 "extraordinary rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar, prosecutors allege. They say Pollari worked with U.S. agents to snatch Omar, whose real name is Hassan Mustafa Omar Nasr, off a Milan street and whisk him to Egypt for interrogation.

Pollari says he wants Rice, the current U.S. secretary of state and U.S. national security adviser in 2003, to testify for him as a defense witness, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Wednesday.

Abu Omar is broke, and emailing people for help.

Omar is a suspected al Qaeda operative who in 2003 was kidnapped off a street in Milan, Italy by CIA agents and secretly flown to Cairo for a hard interrogation by Egyptian security forces, overseen by a CIA official.

Now free but physically broken -- he has shown his wounds to visiting reporters -- Omar took to the Internet from Egypt last week and began e-mailing human rights organizations, the United Nations and bloggers who have written about his case, asking for financial help with bringing his family together.

I received mine last Saturday, June 21, having written extensively about the case.