Agreed. Conyers seems to find nothing urgent. He seems content to keep the pot simmering until the next administration comes along, while possibly keeping Rove busy worrying about hearings during the latter part of this election cycle. Actually doing something? Doesn’t seem a priority.

My Congressperson (Neil Abercrombie) has finally signed on to Wexler’s letter to Conyers asking for impeachment proceedings to begin. I have been badgering my poor congresscritter about impeachment action for more than a year, but at last he’s done this much. I’d love to see a youtube of Abercrombie taking on the Bushies for Constitutional mayhem, because his rants can equal Kennedy’s in passion and pointedness, but alas! I fear that no such youtubes exist.

Perhaps if enough Firepups got their congresscritters to sign this letter, Conyers might do something.

Bob in HI

When the defence in that trial demanded a long list of government witnesses who are very unlikely to appear or to be allowed to appear, weren’t people thinking that that had been arranged on purpose? To end in dismissal? Sorry: running on vague memories. But I think that chetnolian could be right, and that the Italian trial could be a similar drama.

At least a few in JAG have spoken out.

Go back and look at the horrible torture killing of Dilawar and the response. Go look at the el-Masri kidnapping and torture and dumping and the flat RUSH of DOJ to cover up. Go look at the Arar kidnapping and torture with Thompson’s name right on the documents and the closure of ranks to further victimize Arar and his family while covering up for torturers. Go look at the fervor of Thompson, Comey, Philbin and Goldsmith in advocating for torture to be mainstreamed even more than it already has been, by adding Haynes to Bybee on the Circuit bench in lifetime appointments.

In the end it really wasn’t gratuitous. It’s how you cement the bonds of power -to make people so support despotic violence that they advocate for and promote unwarranted detention, human trafficking and torture on whims and without consequence – that ties them irrevocably to those who pull the torture strings.

It blows my mind that those men and women can go to bed every night knowing the victims that their actions and failure to act, advocacy and silence, have created and without a second thought. I truly cannot believe how low the system of justice in this country has fallen. When the prosecutors hear of men and women and children bought and kidnapped and tortured and their only questions are “how can we help cover it up and make sure no one gets charged”

So very sad.

Will that change with bigger Congressional majorities and a Democrat in the White House? I don’t think anybody knows. We should and it’s wrong that we don’t.

State-run healthcare systems are universal in western Europe, indeed, in the developed world outside the United States. Reasonable access to healthcare is considered a civil right. It is a feature, like police and fire services, that government has a duty to provide or superintend. It is not a function that can responsibly be left to depend on the vagaries of employment or income. That applies to pensions, too, heaven forfend.

Berlusconi acknowledges that expectation of the state’s responsibility as a necessary precondition to obtaining and maintaining political power. He may not agree with it, but he wouldn’t take on such things directly – he’d be considered foolish or deranged if he did so. He is neither; he just has bigger fish to fry.

He’s basically been saying that Berlusconi is lying about not knowing anything about the rendition efforts and that there are documents that show both that Berlusconi did know about what was going on and also that show that Pollari objected. He wants to have Berlusconi testify about the existence/content of the documents from the reports I have seen.

http://africa.reuters.com/wire…..40283.html

Italy’s former spy chief, General Nicolo Pollari, wants Berlusconi and other past officials — including former prime minister Romano Prodi — to testify about classified documents he says prove he had nothing to do with a rendition.

“Berlusconi always defended Pollari in public because he knows about these documents, classified as state secrets,” Pollari’s lawyer Titta Madia told Reuters, adding his client believed 88 such documents exist.

“Berlusconi is aware that these documents show that General Pollari expressed his opposition regarding illegal actions of this kind, even to the point of threatening to resign.”

And unlike here in the states, where it is the prosecutors with DOJ who rush to file “state secrets” protections for the criminals in the Executive Branch, as the Reuter’s piece notes the prosecutors (now if we had ONE Spataro anywhere in DOJ, wouldn’t it be different?) in Italy have pretty much facilitated Pollari’s requests to put the big bannanas on the stand.

I’m not sure that there will be any questioning on Ledeen et al, since the grounds for Berlusconi being called have nothing to do with the Niger forgeries and since US DOJ has had a lot of years to come up with one good man on that front and failed.

Rove = hare.
Conyers = tortoise.

I do hope you’re right, but I am getting tired of waiting so long to see some motion in the tortoise.

Bob in HI

Sounds to me more like a Fascist, and a soul-mate for Bush.

Correct. Berlusconi supports state-run everything, as long as it is understood that the interests of the state are identical with the interests of large corporations (and that was how fascism was first defined by Mussolini, who knew what he was talking about on that score).

That kind of state-run healthcare system would be worlds apart from, eg, the wicked (actually very pallid) public system we have here in the frozen north, which we are still trying to keep out of corporatist hands, although we could lose at any time.

State-run does not automatically mean socialist, iow. It can just as easily mean far right, and in Berlusconi’s fantastical dreams, it certainly does.