State Department Legal Adviser Says U.S. Will Not Extradite CIA Defendants to Italy

On February 28, 2007, John B. Bellinger, III, the U.S. legal adviser at the Department of State, publicly stated that the U.S. government would refuse to honor Italian requests for the extradition of 25 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force officer. The twenty-six relators were charged in a February 16, 2007 indictment in connection with the alleged kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric in Milan four years ago. Bellinger also warned that European criminal prosecutions of U.S. agents were harming transatlantic counterterrorism efforts ... [more]