Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, Robert Seldon Lady

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE55T3H420090630?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true

"I'm not guilty. I'm only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors," Lady, the CIA's Milan station chief at the time, was quoted as telling Il Giornale newspaper when asked whether he participated in the abduction.

He said he committed no crime because it was a "state matter." "I console myself by reminding myself that I was a soldier, that I was in a war against terrorism, that I couldn't discuss orders given to me."

Lady, now retired, spoke from an undisclosed location over the Internet to the paper, which is owned by the brother of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

He said an Italian police officer, who already confessed to police and was given a suspended sentence, was the only Italian at the scene of the Milan abduction.

"I wasn't at the scene and I didn't organize the thing, the rendition, the arrest, the kidnapping, however we want to call it," said Lady, who is being tried in absentia. "But my belief is that at that moment there weren't other Italians."

Berlusconi, who was also in power at the time of Nasr's disappearance, has denied any Italian state knowledge of any secret CIA transfer. But he also successfully waged a campaign to get classified testimony and documents related to Italy's collaboration with the CIA stripped from the trial proceedings.

Berlusconi says the trial risks isolating Italian spies from the international intelligence community.