R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I know Condoleeza Rice is a trained pianist and a classical music fan, she must have heard Aretha Franklin's hit song a few times. Perhaps she needs to listen again.

Secretary Rice discussed our policies about rendition on Monday:

The United States has respected -- and will continue to respect -- the sovereignty of other countries.

The Italian authorities beg to differ:

MILAN -- In March 2003, the Italian national anti-terrorism police received an urgent message from the CIA about a radical Islamic cleric who had mysteriously vanished from Milan a few weeks before. The CIA reported that it had reliable information that the cleric, the target of an Italian criminal investigation, had fled to an unknown location in the Balkans.

In fact, according to Italian court documents and interviews with investigators, the CIA's tip was a deliberate lie, part of a ruse designed to stymie efforts by the Italian anti-terrorism police to track down the cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian refugee known as Abu Omar.

The first portion of the official warrants detail the investigation into the alleged abduction of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. The names and other identifiers for 21 alleged CIA operatives have been removed. The Post generally does not identify or reveal undercover CIA officers. The CIA and lawyer for one of the defendants in the case, retired CIA officer Robert Seldon Lady, did not object to his being named.

The strategy worked for more than a year until Italian investigators learned that Nasr had not gone to the Balkans after all. Instead, prosecutors here have charged, he was abducted off a street in Milan by a team of CIA operatives who took him to two U.S. military bases in succession and then flew him to Egypt, where he was interrogated and allegedly tortured by Egyptian security agents before being released to house arrest.

Italian judicial authorities publicly disclosed the CIA operation in the spring. But a review of recently filed court documents and interviews in Milan offer fresh details about how the CIA allegedly spread disinformation to cover its tracks and how its actions in Milan disrupted and damaged a major Italian investigation.

Looks like we need to make another adjustment to the dictionary. Just as "torture" in Bush-speak excludes so many techniques that the world calls torture, "respect the sovereignity" in Bush-speak means lying to local anti-terrorism authorities, and taking people off their streets to be "not tortured" in another country.

Somehow, I don't think this is what Aretha was singing about.