In Italy, over 100,000 protesters marched in Vicenza on Saturday to protest a plan to double the size of a U.S. military base in the city. Over 2,700 U.S. forces are already based in the Italian city. Critics of the plan say the base will be used as a staging post for the U.S. military to attack Iraq and Afghanistan. The protesters included several Americans, including John Gilbert, a professor at the University of Florence.

John Gilbert: “We are here today from Florence, Rome and other cities as United States citizens to say no to this mega base. Also in solidarity with the people that is demonstrating in New York today, for the retire of all the U.S. troops from Iraq, this demonstrations are complementary. There is nothing anti-American about them. We want a future for our children, which is a future of peace and global justice, not preventive war, no illegal renditions and torture.”

Saturday’s protest in Italy came just a day after an Italian judge indicted 26 Americans, most of them CIA officers, in connection with the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric from the streets of Milan. The Americans are expected to be tried in absentia. The Italian defense attorney Alessia Sorgato has been assigned to represent the CIA agents but she has never communicated with them.

Alessia Sorgato: “I have never seen them. I have never read something from them. We wrote some letters, but they prefer not to answer to us. But this is the right of a defendant not to come here and not to answer to his lawyer. It’s normal.”