Italy demonstrates to United States how to handle government wrongdoing

The democracy wasting disease that was the Bush administration until this year got its latest comeuppance on Wednesday when a court in Italy sentenced 23 U.S. residents, including at least 22 CIA agents, to prison terms of at least five years each for abducting a Muslim cleric in 2003 and secreting him to Egypt for interrogation. The case, which has been ongoing since 2007, is the first judicial reckoning of the practice of extraordinary rendition, a constitutional perversion under which U.S. agents abducted suspects in other countries and took them to a third country that permitted harsh interrogations, according to the Reuters international news service. The U.S. citizens were tried in absentia because Washington refused to allow them to be extradited to Italy to face trial. Two members of Italy's spy service, Sisma, were sentenced to three-year prison terms for participating in the renditions, suggesting that Italy was aware of the U.S. operation that took the cleric, Abu Omar, off a street in Milan and flew him to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and then to Egypt. Abu Omar claimed he was held without charge and mistreated in Egyptian custody until his release in 2007. U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said today that the Obama administration was "disappointed" in the convictions and would probably appeal, but refused to comment further. But human rights groups opposed to the practices of the Bush administration showed no such reluctance. Joan Sunderland of Human Rights Watch called the verdict "historic," Reuters said. Amnesty International admonished the United States for having gone to court at all. "The United States shouldn't need a foreign court to distinguish right from wrong," the group said in a statement. "The Obama administration must repudiate the unlawful practice of extraordinary rendition -- and hold accountable those responsible for having put the system in place -- or his administration will end up as tarnished as his predecessor's." The United States has never acknowledged any rendition flights from Italy, Reuters said.

War means big business -- U.S. tops list of weapons exporters

Just when it seemed Washington was ready to resume its expected role of helping to bring sanity to world affairs comes word of a congressional study finding the United States was involved in more than two-thirds of worldwide arms sales last year. The study, released Friday by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, found U.S. arms sales increased 50 percent in 2008 to $37.8 billion despite the worldwide recession, according to the New York Times. The report shows the United States is by far the world's largest arms trader, with Italy a distant second at $3.7 billion and Russia third at $3.5 billion. The report said U.S. arms sales increased nearly 50 percent from 2007. The increase was attributed by the report "not only to major new orders from clients in the Near East and in Asia, but also to the continuation of significant equipment and support services contracts with a broad-based number of U.S. clients globally. The study, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations," was written by Richard F. Grimmett, a specialist in international security at the CRS, a division of the Library of Congress. Top buyers of U.S. arms and equipment in the developing world were United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the report said, while main buyers of Russian armaments were China, India and Venezuela. Arms sales to major oil exporting countries helps keep the trillions of dollars they earn in circulation and keeps the world economy in some sort of balance, but is an enormous temptation to become aggressive and start wars.

World's richest nations plan economic recovery

Maybe the worldwide recession actually is over. The world's eight richest nations ended two days of talks Saturday in Italy to plan for the expected worldwide economic recovery, according to the Reuters international news service. Or maybe the recession is about to be over for them. Meeting in Lecce, finance ministers of the world's eight richest nations began getting ready for the end of stimulus programs propping up their economies. "The force of the economic storm is receding," U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said as the Group of Eight meeting concluded. "There are encouraging signs of stabilization across many economies." Ministers agreed that the stimulus programs would not be ending anytime soon, however, and also agreed to ask the International Monetary Fund to help them figure out the best way to bring the programs to a conclusion. But there appeared to be sharp disagreement on how to roll back stimulus spending plans and how to stress-test each country's banks, Reuters said. In fact, Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin called the meeting "stormy" since there were major arguments about what stage the crisis had reached. Conservative nations like Germany and Canada are pressuring other G8 nations to end stimulus programs to keep interest rates from rising too rapidly once the recovery takes hold. But Geithner said the United States would probably not be tightening monetary policy anytime soon. "It is too early to shift toward policy restraint," he told the ministers. Reuters said a G8 source who did not want to be named said the IMF report would likely be presented in October at the fund's annual meeting in Istanbul. Private sector economists do not expect tightening of fiscal and monetary policy before next year, Reuters said. The other G8 nations are Japan, Britain, France and Italy.

Italy seeks dismissal of criminal case against spies over Bush rendition program

It certainly looks as if lawyers representing Italy will succeed in getting the criminal prosecution against 33 U.S. and Italian undercover operatives thrown out of Rome's Constitutional Court and avoid another international embarassment over the former Bush administration's war on terror. The 33 spies -- 26 Americans and 7 Italians, are accused of kidnapping a Muslim imam from Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured. The Americans, many or all of whom are reported to be CIA agents, are being tried in absentia. The government in Rome contends prosecutors broke Italian law while building their case against the 33 operatives by using wiretaps and questioning them about classified matters, and wants the evidence suppressed. "If the government's position is upheld by the Constitutional Court, certain evidence will become impossible to use," Italy's attorney Ignazio Francesco Caramazza, who wants the trial stopped, told the Reuters international news service before the start of this week's closed-door hearings. An attorney for the prosecutors, Alessandro Pace, contends no laws were broken in the gathering of evidence. The trial, which is due to start in a lower court, has been held pending the outcome of this appeal. Human rights groups accuse the United States and some of its allies of breaking international law by using agents to capture suspects in other countries, Reuters said, a practice called "rendition." But the United States defends rendition as an important anti-terrorism tool and denies torture allegations, Reuters said, including those raised by the Milan man, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Nasr claims he was beaten and shocked in custody before being released in 2007. He still faces allegations of terrorist activity in Italy.