This article is more about Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, than about the former State Department officer facing charges in Italy.

To be succinct, this article is also about cleric  Abu Omar who was living in Milan, Italy, and while walkng on a street in Milan,  he was abducted by CIA agents acting as if they were Italian policemen.   He was taken into a van, where he was beaten, drugged, and then sent to Egypt to be brutally tortured with electric shocks and more.

As a result of this criminal abduction and subsequent rendition to the violent, corrupt, regime of the decrepit dictator Mubarak, the Italian government opened up an investigation of both, Abu Omar, and its abductors and the outcome was that criminal charges against 26 Americans were filed and a trial in absentia convicted all of them.

Among these 26 indicted Americans is a former State Department officer who worked at the U.S. Consulate in Milan, Italy and her name is Sabrina De Souza.

For a more elaborate report on this story, Mother Jones magazine has published an extensive report.

In today’s The Washington Post edition (April 21, 2016), in a front page article titled “Ex-CIA Officer Faces Jail in Italy” we learn that one of the Italian government indicted 26 Americans, apparently involved indirectly in the criminal abduction of Abu Omar, was Sabrina de Souza, whose ancestry is from Portugal.   She is about to deported by Portugal to Italy to face the Italian charges of abduction for the purpose of rendition to torture in Mubarak’s Egypt of Abu Omar.

Ms. de Souza, however, may have been only marginally involved in this criminal abduction for the purpose of shipping a man who has not been charged with a crime to be tortured in Cairo and hence she is now suing the CIA and  the Justice Department, claiming that the blame for this crime lies with the Government since it allowed/ordered CIA and Justice to violate the Freedom of Information Act in order to refuse to confirm the existence of documents she had requested which would show that the criminal act of abduction and rendition to torture in Mubarak’s barbaric regime was approved by senior government officials.

This is where the most noteworthy aspect of this article surfaces.

Ms. Sabrina de Souza, since her conviction by Armando Spataro, the Italian prosecutor, has hired a series of attorneys to clear her name, and in 2012, after Italy’s highest court upheld her conviction, her attorney appealed to then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, asking her to authorize an inquiry into the case.  Astoundingly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose to not respond.

So, in effect, we have a  State Department official, who was an officer at the U.S. Consulate in Milan, who was also an informant for the CIA, appealing to the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, for support in releasing FOIA documents which would result the revelation of information which would exonerate her from the direct involvement in the criminal abduction and subsequent rendition to torture by the Mubarak regime of cleric Abu Omar, and yet  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chose to not give Ms. De Souza’s attorney’s even the courtesy of a response.

This is even more astounding in the light that, while the whole world has known what a low life the thuggish  Mubarak dictatorship has been thorough its more than 30 years of oppressing the Egyptian people, while simultaneously being involved along with his sons, in the embezzlement of billions of dollars of government funds,  Hillary Clinton, the potential candidate for the Presidency of the United States, had the temerity to declare that she feels for dictator Mubarak as if he was a member of the family.

There is an aphorism that says, “people deserve the government they elect”.

This aphorism is badly flawed in this case.

“We the people” do not deserve to have to make the choice between depraved and ethically bankrupt Republican neocons who are corrupted to the core and who for the last 8 Obama years, particularly, but well before that, did nothing but act like “Contra” obstructionists,  and before that period brought us nothing but deregulation engendered colossal financial damage and the wasteful hemorrhage of American and foreign blood by ushering in an era of perpetual wars for perpetual profits for the industrial military complex and for a never attainable global hegemony,   and a so-called Democrat who is in effect a neocon dressed up as a neoliberal who is as hawkish an inciter of fear and hatred and coddler of dictators as long as they are “our” dictators who align with the interests of the dictates of the plutocrats in our democracy which is now in dire danger of extinction.

We don’t deserve a mainstream media which is derelict in its duty to inform us objectively and professionally, and we most certainly do not deserve the catastrophic consequences of the corrosion of our democracy by a reckless, greedy, power lusting, plutocracy run amok by deregulation.

Without wishing to be perceived as ending this article by what some may derisively characterize as a “political endorsement” type statement, this writer nevertheless ends this article by stating the obvious, namely that at this point, NOBODY but Senator Bernie Sanders and his authentic social democratic movement can usher in the beginning of an era of incremental reforms conducive to a national healing from the scourges of violence, wars, corruption, greed, dishonesty, polarization, ignorance, arrogance, and the horribly intoxicating effect of the multi-billionaires and of some or their corporations in the workings of our badly dysfunctional non-representative pseudo-democracy.

We can and must be inspired by our Canadian neighbors, particularly now under the leadership of Trudeau Junior.