Pricey Rendition

America's spy agencies need more money, a sleeker bureaucratic structure, fluent Arabic speakers and a host of other reforms and gimmicks to protect the United States and its allies from harm. Add one more urgent need: a sense of proportion.

In substance and style, the exposure of the "extraordinary rendition" -- Bush-era legalese for kidnapping -- of a radical Egyptian cleric off a Milan street in 2003 reveals a crushing inability by higher-ups here to ask

and answer sensibly this question: Is this covert act really worth the likely consequences?

It certainly seemed worth it to the spies who lived in five-star luxury hotels while setting up the snatch -- and briefly afterward to rest up, it seems -- as long as the operation was never discovered and publicized. I hear the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan makes an unforgettable cappuccino.

But their incredibly sloppy tradecraft in bundling Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr onto a CIA-chartered jet and flying him to Cairo for interrogation virtually guaranteed that the operation would surface and be used against the United States and -- more consequentially -- against Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of President Bush's staunchest allies in the war on terrorism.

In the "timing is everything" department, Berlusconi announced Wednesday that he would seek reelection next year, only to be hit on Thursday with a Post exclusive quoting unnamed "CIA veterans" asserting that the Italian government was in on the operation all along.

The story goaded a tardy, unconvincing denial from Rome of any involvement in the grab. But the earlier total silence from Berlusconi's office and its now overtaken orders to Italian officials not to discuss the matter publicly lend substantial weight to the account of the "veterans."

The quickness of CIA officials to give up sources makes reporters Judith Miller and Matt Cooper look even more heroic for stubbornly resisting the disclosure of theirs to another overzealous, judgment-impaired official, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Cooper and Miller opposed Thursday's decision by Time Inc. to give some documents to Fitzgerald.

Unlike those two journalists, the "veterans" rushed to break a CIA pledge to the Italians never to confirm the incident if it became public -- which it did on June 23 when an Italian magistrate issued arrest warrants for 13 U.S. intelligence agents.

Berlusconi, like other foreign leaders who cooperate intimately with the Bush administration, will have to fend for himself against this embarrassment, which comes after one of his own ace secret operatives was killed in a tragic error by U.S. troops in Iraq. The Italian magistrates -- who have long been convinced that their national chief is a crook -- will make sure the kidnapping story does not go away.

Americans should focus on what this incident reveals about the lack

of effective restraints and review placed by the Bush administration