Dick Cheney, Meet Sabrina deSouza

Sabrina deSouza is one of the 23 U.S. officials convicted in Italy for the illegal CIA rendition of an Egyptian terrorist suspect named Abu Omar. She concedes the United States “broke the law” in ordering and carrying out the rendition, and says, “we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this.”

Wow, who could that be? Remember this:

Well, you think, for example, in the intelligence arena. We ask those people to do some very difficult things. Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president, and they do so with the — in this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody’s going to sign up for those kinds of missions.It’s a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community. If they assume that they’re going to have to be dealing with the political consequences — and it’s clearly a political move. I mean, there’s no other rationale for why they’re doing this — then they’ll be very reluctant in the future to do that.

Back in the real world, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s decisions to embrace illegality and instruct CIA operatives to carry it out have resulted in the actual convictions in absentia of 23 people. What do you think the odds are that Cheney will pay deSouza’s legal bills with all his oil money?