A half century ago the CIA could bring down an Iranian prime minister with a few rent-a-crowds, well placed payments to key generals and a pliable replacement.

Could it do the same today?

Not likely, but events in Iran have often contradicted the prognostications of Westerners, especially at the CIA.

In the continuing cacophony over what torture is and whether it "works," an important point has gone missing, say current and former counterterrorism operatives.

The CIA's reliance on repeated, and brutal, "enhanced" interrogation techniques shows how few spies the spy agency had before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

That made the agency's reliance on squeezing new information out of captured terrorist suspects all the more desperate, many say.

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.