Last week, Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI (the Italian counterpart to our CIA), was fired.

Pollari is currently being investigated for his alleged involvement in the CIA’s 2003 kidnapping in Milan of Egyptian refugee/Islamist radical cleric Hassan Nasr (aka Abu Omar), who was then “extraordinarily rendered” back to Egypt where he reportedly was tortured. I questioned Scott McClellan about the case a year ago.

Last summer, two of Pollari’s deputies were arrested in connection with the kidnapping case, and now one of them, Marco Mancini, is reportedly cooperating with prosecutors.

Pollari was also the guy who met secretly with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley one month before the forged Niger yellowcake documents arrived in the U.S. Laura Rozen summarized an investigative series published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, in which it was alleged that Pollari traveled to Washington to deliver the cooked intelligence directly to the White House, after being rebuffed more than once by the CIA, who did not find the intelligence credible.

(Note: When I questioned Hadley directly about the meeting last November, he said it had been a purely social call, that he really couldn’t remember much about it, and that he had no recollection that it involved either a discussion of “natural uranium” or the “passing of documents.” Pollari, however, according to Rozen, had apparently refused to admit to a meeting with Hadley, stating to reporters that he had met officially only with then-CIA Director George Tenet, among Bush administration officials, since becoming chief of SISMI in 2001. So, one guy says the meeting was trivial, the other says it didn’t happen. I think this might be an instance when Cheney’s Principle, “the lack of evidence means that they must have it,”* applies.)

*See last sentence of third paragraph of third section.

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