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.

Who can forget Victor Mature as Interpol secret agent Charles Sturgis?

Almost everybody, it turns out. The 1957 B-movie was almost immediately consigned to the crime noir dustbin.

But the popular image of the International Criminal Police Organization as a global network of brilliant sleuths has never dimmed - no matter that Interpol doesn't really do any policing itself.

It "facilitates the exchange of information to assist law enforcement agencies in the United States and throughout the world in detecting and deterring international crime and terrorism through a network of 187 member countries," in the words of the Justice Department's Inspector General.

Washington's node on the Interpol network is the U.S. National Central Bureau.

And it's apparently clueless, the IG said in a stinging audit report Monday.

A former top CIA counterterrorism official today questioned the central tenet of the war in Afghanistan, saying a U.S. defeat and Al Qaeda's return to a safe haven there would not pose a grave threat to the United States.

Paul R. Pillar, a South Asia expert who was deputy chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in the late 1990s, argued in a Washington Post Op-ed piece that Al Qaeda's haven in Afghanistan was not critical to the success of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and would be even less so today.

"How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven?"  Pillar asked.

With his slice of the $75 billion annual intelligence budget, top U.S. spymaster Adm. Dennis Blair today issued a thick report saying that a "deeper and broader understanding of threats and opportunities" is "necessary to ensure [success]."

We wish him luck.  After all, if understanding what's going on in the world can't be bought for $75 billion a year, what good is U.S. intelligence?

The fact is, there are plenty of bright people laboring away in the analytical bowels of the CIA, Pentagon, etc.  But what gets to the President too often is hyped and biased, according to another new report on U.S. intelligence, this one from the Brookings Institute.

Key Democrats' disenchantment with the war in Afghanistan appeared to accelerate Monday with Rep. John P. Murtha's hardening opposition to sending more troops U.S. troops there.

"In Vietnam it took 500,000 troops and that didn't solve the problem. So we have to take a different approach," the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on defense told my erstwhile CQ colleague Josh Rogin in his debut column at Foreign Policy online.

What do you call a tsunami that falls on a deserted island?

A seismic event.

George Will's call for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, which surfaced on Aug. 31, seems to fit that category. It hit Washington when the chattering classes were at the beach, toughing out stay-cations or busy putting their kids in school.

So let's take another look.

Former Goldman Sachs chief Philip D. Murphy evidently arrived in the style to which he is accustomed last month to take up his new post as U.S. envoy to Germany, touching down in an ostentatious top-of-the-line executive jet that left German Chancellor Angela Merkel grinding her teeth over President Obama's gift of ambassadorships to wealthy donors.

The father of the Pakistani bomb says that helping the CIA fight the Russians in Afghanistan gave his country "the space" it needed to develop nuclear weapons.

"We were allying with the United States in the Afghan war. The aid was coming," nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan said in an Aug. 31 Pakistan television interview, an English translation of which surfaced Tuesday.

"I maintain that the war had provided us with space to enhance our nuclear capability," Khan  added.

"The credit goes to me and my team, because it was a very difficult task, which was next to impossible. But given the US and European pressure on our program, it is true that had the Afghan war not taken place at that time, we would not have been able to make the bomb as early as we did," Khan said.

What do President Obama and the Queen of England have in common?

Why, Lyndon LaRouche, of course.

Laughed off as a wing nut for his longtime campaign to lay the global narcotics trade at the feet of England's monarch, LaRouche rarely merits more than a passing mention in serious political coverage.

But what seems to have escaped the notice of all but a few astute reporters is that those incendiary, TV-worthy posters of Obama-as-Hitler originated not with outraged populists or conservative Republicans but LaRouche.