If his first publicly known rendition case is any indication, there may well be a legitimate question as to whether Obama’s rendition program is even more repulsive than that of George Bush. More evidence will be required for an informed answer, but Obama is off to a very inauspicious beginning. From Scott Horton in an exclusive for Huffington Post:

[I]n a federal court in suburban Washington, a case is unfolding that gives us a practical sense of what an Obama-era rendition looks like.

Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch.

According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by "at least eight" heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company’s U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.

This rendition involved no black sites and was clearly driven by a desire to get the target quickly before a court. Also unlike renditions of the Bush-era, the target wasn’t even a terror suspect; rather, he was suspected of fraud. But in a troubling intimation of the last administration, accusations of torture hover menacingly over the case. According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a "body cavity search."

I would say that the evidence of torture is an allegation at this point; but the optics of forced rendition for simple contracting fraud are disturbing. No terrorism, no deaths, and it does not even appear that Azar is a principal in the company, Sima International.

But in all three previous administrations, renditions have been considered a rare technique reserved for dangerous terrorists and violent drug kingpins. Azar is at worst a secondary figure in a small-time contract fraud case and is not accused in any way of terrorism. Why such aggressive and dramatic techniques were used in connection with the apprehension of a man suspected of a small-scale white collar crime remains entirely unclear.

Afghanistan is a sovereign country that, by all accounts, Azar was in legally and properly. The Afghan government further appears to have no knowledge of nor participation in, at least that it will admit, the forced removal of Azar at gunpoint by US agents. There are international extradition norms and, although there will certainly be a lot of facts being added to the picture as the case goes forward, the US actions do not seem to comport with them. While the government under Barack Obama seems to remain up to its old (and some new) egregious tricks, the one check and balance left in this country, the Federal Judiciary, seems to be on the ball already:

Azar’s allegations will now go before United States District Court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, who must test Azar’s claims to have been tortured and act on his motion to dismiss the charges and suppress his confession. Motions of this sort are generally reckoned a long shot, as most judges prefer to have everything fully developed at trial. But at a 90-minute hearing held on July 17, Judge Lee indicated his discomfort with the prosecutors’ conduct, and specifically with their failure to supply the defendants with background information about the capture and interrogation of Azar and Cobos in Afghanistan. He asked three government prosecutors who were present if they were familiar with the Stevens case before Federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, in which a special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate potential criminal misconduct by the prosecutors. He insisted that the prosecutors immediately turn over to the defendants their records, including interview notes and any exculpatory materials.

Judge G. Bruce Lee. Sounds like a guy not to be messed with. Good.

Amazing isn’t it that the US government can snatch Azar at gunpoint, bag him, tag him and fly him to Virginia for minor contracting fraud by his employer, yet they cannot seem to do so much as stop giving bonuses to KBR who kills American soldiers through their reckless disregard. Nor have they bagged and sensory deprived anybody from DynCorp, who has engaged in major fraud on defense contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Go figure.

Eric Lichtblau and Eric Lipton have an article on the Purgegate document release in today’s New York Times. There were a few paragraphs by the two Erics that stood out to me:

Aides to former President George W. Bush have asserted that the Justice Department took the lead in the dismissals, which set off a political firestorm that lasted months. Mr. Rove played down his role in the firings in a recent interview and in closed testimony last month before Congressional investigators.

Well that was clearly a pack of lies; let’s call it what it is fellas.

“The amount of backstabbing and treachery involved is just breathtaking,” Mr. Iglesias said of the White House e-mail, in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s astounding that without reviewing the evidence or talking to the F.B.I. or anything, the White House would assume that these were provable cases and that I needed to file them for the political benefit of the party. That’s not what U.S. attorneys do.”

Hey Dave, they didn’t give a damn if the charges were provable, they just wanted them filed to prejudice Democrats before the election. Iglesias was wronged here, but he keeps consistently soft pedaling what occurred so as to remain a good Republican, and the distinction is a critical and clear one. It wansn’t that they "assumed provable cases"; they just didn’t care about the sufficiency of the charges. I really like Iglesias in a way, but this isn’t the first time he has treaded too lightly, he was all mushy over Scott Bloch too. Enough.

Robert Luskin, a lawyer for Mr. Rove, said the material released Tuesday demonstrated that there was “absolutely no evidence” the White House had used inappropriate political motivations to punish federal prosecutors. Mr. Luskin said Mr. Rove and other White House aides were legitimately concerned about voter fraud and were debating “completely reasonable and legitimate policy questions.”

Gold Bars is such a total tool. And man does he get around with the media outlets. Does he rent space at all of them or something?

Bush administration officials have publicly suggested that Mr. Iglesias was dismissed because of a subpar performance and absences from the office — he was a Navy reservist.

Those issues do not surface in the newly released e-mail. Rather, the dissatisfaction of New Mexico Republicans over the investigations was the focus in 2005 and 2006. Nonetheless, one message shows that the White House was told that the Justice Department planned to say the New Mexico investigations played no role in the dismissal.

In that exchange, in February 2007, William K. Kelly, of the White House Counsel’s Office, wrote an e-mail message to several senior officials, including Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and Tony Snow, the press secretary. Referring to the Justice Department, Mr. Kelly wrote, “They are planning to deny that the investigation in question played any role in DOJ’s decision, and to deny that any Member contacted main Justice to complain about the conduct (or not) of any particular investigation.”

Hard evidence of a predetermined plan to deceive the public and obstruct any investigation that could occur (presumably by Congress). And The DOJ was front and center with the WH in complicity. Anybody else see a conflict of interest here in a DOJ investigation by say, I dunno, Nora Dannehy? By the way, when can we expect the charges on all these facts and implications Nora? There are certainly grounds, on several fronts, against several individuals, first and foremost Gonzales, but others as well. Anybody taking odds on whether any charges are filed at all?

As the first Purgegate document thread is getting long in the tooth, do not hesitate to continue here using this as another working thread.

Adam Cohen of the New York Times is a fairly astute writer on legal issues, and he has a new article up on the interesting case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The case involves the ability of corporations to further pollute elections in the United States with unregulated big money. From Cohen’s NYT article:

The founders were wary of corporate influence on politics — and their rhetoric sometimes got pretty heated. In an 1816 letter, Thomas Jefferson declared his hope to “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

This skepticism was enshrined in law in the early 20th century when the nation adopted strict rules banning corporations from contributing to political campaigns. Today that ban is in danger from the Supreme Court, which hears arguments next month in a little-noticed case that could open the floodgates to corporate money in politics.

The court has gone to extraordinary lengths to hear the case. And there are worrying signs that there may well be five votes to rule that the ban on corporate contributions violates the First Amendment.
…
If the ban is struck down, corporations may soon be writing large checks to the same elected officials whom they are asking to give them bailouts or to remove health-and-safety regulations from their factories or to insert customized loopholes into the tax code.

The entire article is not that long and well worth a read for the history and set up for the case at bar. Cohen is right that the ban is in jeopardy; and the Roberts court does seem to have a hard on for this issue, having taken extraordinary steps to wade into this case, which is not that well set up for a Supreme Court determination on such a critical and far reaching issue.

The Court did indeed take a case in which the ban on corporate political contributions was not a central issue and instructed the parties to brief on the ban’s constitutionality. The Court then accelerated oral argument on its calendar to a September date before the new SCOTUS term even starts. This sure looks to be the handiwork of Chief Justice John Roberts; anybody who says Roberts is not an "activist judge", and has no agenda, is nuttier than a fruitcake.

I do wish, however, that Cohen had written a longer piece and gone into some of the other fascinating aspects of this very important case. First off, Cohen did not even mention that this is the infamous "Hillary: The Movie" case from the 2008 primary election campaign. Citizens United is a right wing political hatchet group run by David Bossie, one of the key front men for the Congressional Republicans pressing the Whitewater investigations. There is a lot of wingnut skulduggery rooting around in the background here.

Secondly, Cohen (nor I) isn’t kidding when he says the Court is reaching wildly to frame the issues as it has demanded on corporate campaign donations. The issues on appeal were originally: (1) did the 2003 decision in McConnell v. FEC resolve the constitutionality of as-applied challenges to the disclosure and disclaimer rules; (2) do said rules impose an unconstitutional burden when applied to ”political speech” protected by the FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life decision; (3) did the FEC v. Wisconsin Right To Life decision require, for regulation, a definite call for a vote for or against a candidate; and (4) whether a feature-length documentary can be treated as if it were an “ad” of the kind at issue in the McConnell v. FEC decision. With, really, a fair amount of emphasis on "4", whether the movie was a political ad. This is a far cry from where the Roberts Court is now heading.

Third, Cohen doesn’t mention the bizarre procedural history behind where the case sits now. SCOTUSWiki has an absolutely great history and explanation, written by Lyle Denniston, of the issues and process of Citizens v. Federal Elections Commission. Suffice it, for here, to say that the case has already been argued to the Court once and ought to be decided by now. Problem seems to be that Chief Justice Roberts was put off by the more liberal members questioning of Ted Olson after some passionate, but mostly tangential, First Amendment arguments he made at the first oral argument. Remember that horse manure that John Roberts pitched at his confirmation hearing about his "job being to call balls and strikes"? He lied through his teeth.

Lastly, there is the advance of the femme fatales Cohen forgot to mention. First, and foremost, is the newly sworn in Justice Sonia Sotomayor. It will be, of course, her very first case heard as the new junior member (Alito must be relieved to be off coffee and donuts duty) of the Court. Here is Russ Feingold questioning Sotomayor about Citizens United v. FEC at her confirmation hearing (as with all questioners, he didn’t get much out of her).

And then, of course, we have Obama’s crack Solicitor General Elena Kagan. At least Sonia Sotomayor has a long and deep history of work in trial and appellate courtrooms, both as an attorney and a jurist, under her belt. Not so Elena Kagan. The Justice Department has confirmed Kagan will indeed personally argue the case on September 9. By all accounts, and all I have been able to discern, Kagan’s first words on September 9 will be the first words she has ever uttered in battle in any kind of courtroom, anywhere, at any time, ever. That, in and of itself, is both fascinating and stupefying.

With all this time, and a whole Solicitor General’s office of more experienced attorneys, not to mention the DOJ, to help her with the training wheels, she should at least not embarrass herself you would think. But, then again, she will be up against Ted Olson, as seasoned a SCOTUS pro as exists on the face of the earth (and a distinguished former Solicitor General himself). We shall see; ought to be worth paying attention to I think.

While this decision will be immediately appealed, in what was a proxy power fight, Thailand has refused to extradite Viktor Bout to the United States to be tried on charges of trafficking arms to terrorists–Colombia’s FARC.

The DEA maintains that Mr Bout agreed to supply ground-to-air missiles that could have been used to target agency operatives assisting Colombia’s attempts to wipe out cocaine crops.

But on Tuesday the court found in favour of Mr Bout.

“The US charges are not applicable under Thai law,” said the judge delivering the hour-long verdict at Bangkok’s Criminal Court. “This is a political case. The Farc is fighting for a political cause and is not a criminal gang. Thailand does not recognise the Farc as a terrorist group.”

The court “does not have the authority to punish actions done by foreigners against other foreigners in another country”, the judge said.

The FT goes on to describe allegations of attempts, by both the Americans and Russians, to bribe the judges in this case. Who knows the relative truth to that claim? But the decision is interesting because the Thais have thus far refused to follow US bidding in what is undoubtedly an attempt to shut down a horrible arms trafficker (though one we have used in the past), but is also an attempt to shut down a challenge to US influence in developing nations around the world.

And yes, I do find it ironic that Thailand–the country that hosted Abu Zubaydah’s torturers–has refused to accept our representations about who is, and who is not, a terrorist.

The House Judiciary Committee has just released all its materials from the Rove and Miers interviews. They are linked below.

I’m going to take a quick glance before I hop in the car to drive to Pittsburgh.  But I’ll take a closer look tonight.

• Rove Interview
• Miers Interview
• White House Documents
• RNC Documents

BTW, here’s what HJC sent out in the press release.

Key new facts revealed in the materials released today include:[

•    2005 White House “Decision” to fire David Iglesias  – It has previously been known that New Mexico Republicans pressed for Iglesias to be removed because they did not like his decisions on vote fraud cases.  New White House documents show that Rove and his office were involved in this effort no later than May 2005 (months earlier than previously known) – for example, in May and June 2005, Rove aide Scott Jennings sent emails to Tim Griffin (also in Rove’s office) asking “what else I can do to move this process forward” and stressing that “I would really like to move forward with getting rid of NM US ATTY.”   In June 2005, Harriet Miers emailed that a “decision” had been made to replace Iglesias.  At this time, DOJ gave Iglesias top rankings, so this decision was clearly not just the result of the White House following the Department’s lead as Rove and Miers have maintained.¹ 

•    Iglesias criticized by Rove aide for not “doing his job on” Democratic Congressional Candidate Patricia Madrid  –   An October 2006 email chain begun by Representative Heather Wilson criticized David Iglesias for not bringing politically useful public corruption prosecutions in the run up to the 2006 elections.  Scott Jennings forwarded Wilson’s email to Karl Rove and complained that Iglesias had been “shy about doing his job on Madrid,” Wilson’s opponent in the 2006 Congressional race.  Just weeks after this email, Iglesias’ name was placed on the final firing list.²

•    An “agitated” Rove pressed Harriet Miers to do something about Iglesias just weeks before Iglesias was placed on the removal list – Karl Rove phoned Harriet Miers during a visit to New Mexico in September 2006 – according to Miers’ testimony, Rove was “agitated” and told her that Iglesias was “a serious problem and he wanted something done about it.”³

•    Senator Domenici personally asked Bush’s Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to have Iglesias replaced  –In October 2006, Senator Domenici stepped up his campaign to have Iglesias replaced.  According to White House phone logs and emails, as well as Rove’s own testimony, Domenici spoke with President Bush’s Chief of Staff Josh Bolten about Iglesias on October 5, 2006, and during October 2006, Domenici or his staff spoke with Karl Rove at least 4 times.⁴

•    Todd Graves removed in Rove-approved deal with Republican Senator – Kansas City US Attorney Todd Graves was removed as part of a White House-brokered deal with US Senator Kit Bond.  In exchange for the Administration firing Graves, Senator Bond agreed to lift his hold on an Arkansas judge nominated to the Eighth Circuit federal appeals court. A White House email stated that “Karl is fine” with the proposal.⁵                             

•    Miers obtained favorable statement on Rick Renzi in violation of DOJ policy  – When rumors of the FBI investigation of Rep. Rick Renzi surfaced in October, 2006, one of Rove’s subordinates contacted Harriet Miers, who called Deputy Attorney General McNulty seeking a possible statement that would have “vindicated” Renzi.  Even though this was contrary to standard DOJ policy, such a statement was issued several days later.⁶

“I have provided a copy of the materials released today to special U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy to assist in her effort to determine whether federal criminal charges are appropriate and to pursue any such charges,” said Conyers.

As I mentioned above, I’ve been prepping for a panel on Saturday on torture. And so I’ve been reviewing all the things DOJ promised us in mid June or early July that they still haven’t delivered on: The OPR Report, the torture investigation, and–as Daphne Eviatar points out–the new State Secrets policy.

As I reported almost two months ago, Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 17 that he would issue a new policy on when the government will invoke the state secrets privilege to conceal evidence from the public — and even from federal court judges — “in a matter of days.”

Well, it’s August, and still nothing. After Ed asked me the question, I followed up with Dean Boyd, spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division, asking him if that policy had ever been issued. After all, maybe we’d just missed it.

Boyd’s response:  “Not yet; still in the works.”

Presumably, DOJ is trying its luck with some of the State Secrets claims outstanding, such as the Jeppesen claim that the 9th will almost certainly sustain (meaning State Secrets can only be applied to evidence and not information generally). 

And presumably DOJ figures that, with SJC occupied until recently with the Sotomayor confirmation, no one would notice.

In case anyone is wondering, Daphne and I have both officially noticed.

I wanted to fully explain what I think may be the backstory to the LAT’s revelation that the torturers weren’t aware of the limits in the Bybee Two memo. Here’s what the LAT said:

Beyond that, officials said it wasn’t clear that any CIA interrogators were ever informed of the limits laid out in the Justice Department memo.

"A number of people could say honestly, correctly, ‘I didn’t know what was in it,’ " said a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the inner workings of the interrogation program.

A number of you have suggested (correctly, on the merits as presented by LAT) that if the torturers didn’t know what, specifically, was in the OLC memos, then they couldn’t very well think their torture was legal.

But that assumes they don’t have another document that, they may have been led to believe, authorized the torture they did.

On July 24, 2002, OLC verbally authorized a number of torture techniques, not including waterboarding. Around the same time, DOD urgently asked JPRA–the entity that administered SERE–to provide a list of its techniques so it could reverse-engineer interrogation techniques from them. In response, JPRA sent a memo with an attachment that described its techniques. Sort of.

(U) On July 26, 2002, JPRA completed a second memorandum with three attachments to respond to the additional questions from the General Counsel’s office. The memo stated that "JPRA has arguably developed into the DoD’s experts on exploitation and as such, has developed a number of physical pressures to increase the psychological and physical stress on students …"

In the memo, JPRA informed the General Counsel’s office that it had already "assist[ed] in the training of interrogator/exploiters from other governmental agencies charged with OEF exploitation of enemy detainees."190 The memo also stated:

Within JPRA’s evolving curriculum to train interrogators/exploiters many interrogation approaches are taught along with corresponding options for physical pressures to enhance the psychological setting for detainee interrogation. Several of the techniques highlighted (Atch 1) as training tools in JPRA courses, used by other SERE schools, and used historically may be very effective in inducing learned helplessness and ‘breaking’ the OEF detainees’ will to resist."

The first attachment to the July 26,2002 memo was ”Physical Pressures used in Resistance Training and Against American Prisoners and Detainees."192 That attachment included a list of techniques used to train students at SERE school to resist interrogation. The list included techniques such as the facial slap, walling, the abdomen slap, use of water, the attention grasp, and stress positions. 193 The first attachment also listed techniques used by some of the service SERE schools, such as use of smoke, shaking and manhandling, cramped confinement, immersion in water or wetting down, and waterboarding.

Now, the timing on this document exchange is critically important. This memo was sent to DOD on July 26. The memo was forwarded to OLC (possibly by way of John Rizzo) "for something they were working on," but it’s not clear when (though it had to have been before August 1, since another memo attached with this one was cited in the Bybee Two memo). But on July 26, the day the memo was sent to DOD, at least, OLC verbally approved waterboarding.

Thus, it seems possible that the written description of waterboarding that OLC had when it verbally approved waterboarding on July 26 was the memo sent from JPRA.

I said above that this memo described the SERE techniques, sort of. What it really described was the SERE techniques as James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen had reverse engineered into torture. The memo, SASC tells us, included an emphasis on "learned helplessness," which we know to be Mitchell’s intellectual obsession. And, more importantly, the memo described the torture techniques as Mitchell’s torturers would go on to practice them–not as they were described in the Bybee Two memo. As I’ve reported before, the memo described waterboarding using the large volumes of water that the CIA IG report would later describe was one way the torture as practiced exceeded the torture as authorized in the Bybee Two memo.

JPRA’s description of the waterboarding technique provided in that first attachment was inconsistent in key respects from the U.S. Navy SERE school’s description of waterboarding. According to the Navy SERE school’s operating instructions, for example, while administering the technique, the Navy limited the amount of water poured on a student’s face to two pints. However, the JPRA attachment said that "up to 1.5 gallons of water" may be poured onto a "subject’s face." While the Navy’s operating instructions dictated that "[n]o effort will be made to direct the stream of water into the student’s nostrils or mouth," the description provided by JPRA contained no such limitation for subjects of the technique. While the Navy limited the use ofthe cloth on a student’s face to twenty seconds, the JPRA’s description said only that the cloth should remain in place for a "short period of time." And while the Navy restricted anyone from placing pressure on the chest or stomach during the administration of this technique, JPRA’s description included no such limitation for subjects of the technique.

Attachment one also listed tactics derived from JPRA SERE school lesson plans that were designed to "induce control, dependency, complia[n]ce, and cooperation," including isolation or solitary confinement, induced physical weakness and exhaustion, degradation, conditioning, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, disruption of sleep and biorhythms, and manipulation of diet.

Also note–this memo included stuff, significantly dietary manipulation, that was not included in the Bybee Two memo, but was used with Abu Zubaydah and was ultimately integrated into the 2005 Bradbury memos on torture. (It also included water dousing, which was also incorporated into the torture regime.)

Seeing as how this memo came from the same department that Mitchell and Jessen came from (and which was still championing their torture all over government), chances are good that the torturers did see this document, if not write it themselves. 

See how the gimmick works? CIA gets a verbal authorization for torture that may well have relied on a description of waterboarding that not only included fewer limits, but remarkably described waterboarding as it would be practiced. It gets a written authorization five days later that sets some limits on the waterboarding. But it never shows that written authorization to the torturers.

Tricksy torturers! They’ve invented a way to use this JPRA document–and not the OLC memo–as the "authorization" for their torture.

I look forward to hearing how bmaz and Mary (and the rest of the lawyers in the crowd) rip up this scheme as a legal ploy.

But there’s one more wrinkle.

There were two other documents sent along to DOD and then to OLC with that memo. Another one included some stats about waterboarding and other torture that (as I said above) were cited in the final OLC memo. And the third one is this memo, a JPRA memo explaining all the reasons why torture–and it does use the term "torture"–is ineffective in interrogation.

Conceptually, proponents envision the application oftorture as a means to expedite the exploitation process. In essence, physical and/or psychological duress are viewed as an alternative to the more time consuming conventional interrogation process. The error inherent in this line of thinking is theassumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate intelligence. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption.
(NOTE: The application of physical and or psychological duress will likely result in physical compliance. Additionally, prisoners may answer and/or comply as a result of threats of torture. However, the reliability and accuracy information must be questioned.) 

So, per the LAT, the torturers may well be able to claim they never saw the guidelines in the Bybee Memo. Per the verbal authorization, they may be able to claim they relied on the description sent by JPRA, which happens to describe waterboarding as it was used, not as the Bybee Two memo described it.

But they’d also be relying on an approval process that ties that description of waterboarding directly to a description of SERE techniques like waterboarding as torture, a description that makes clear that torture doesn’t work.

bmaz and I have both covered the government’s Kafkaesque refusal to give Abu Zubaydah–who reportedly has very serious memory issues–his own diary back, thereby making it impossible for him to catalog just what was done to him by James Mitchell’s torturers.

Well, from a Gitmo judge’s ruling last week, it appears there’s a concerted effort to prevent defense attorneys from learning what happened to their clients while being interrogated. (h/t fatster)

Bin al Shibh, 37, is one of five men charged in a complex death penalty prosecution by military commission currently under review by the Obama administration. He allegedly helped organize the Hamburg, Germany, cell of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers before the suicide mission that killed 2,974 people in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.

But his lawyers say he suffers a "delusional disorder,” and hallucinations in his cell at Guantánamo may leave him neither sane enough to act as his own attorney nor to stand trial. Prison camp doctors treat him with psychotropic drugs.

Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge on the case, has scheduled a competency hearing for mid-September.

Meantime, the judge ruled on Aug. 6 that "evidence of specific techniques employed by various governmental agencies to interrogate the accused is . . . not essential to a fair resolution of the incompetence determination hearing in this case.” The Miami Herald obtained a copy of the ruling Monday.

According to the Red Cross, bin al-Shibh was exposed to water dousing, stress positions, food deprivation, and forced shaving. For the entire month of February 2005, he was "restrained on a bed, unable to move … and subjected to cold air conditioning." Of course, that also suggests that his intense interrogation lasted much longer than it did for Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (per the same Red Cross report), since that means he was subjected to intense treatment more than two years after he was captured.

But we (and more importantly, bin al-Shibh’s lawyers) can’t have the details of that treatment because if they learned why he was mentally unfit to stand trial, then it might make it clear that it was torture. And if it did, then bin al-Shibh wouldn’t be the only one standing trial.

For those of you complaining that I’m not reporting on 3-year old Sibel Edmonds revelations, here’s some news that may offer fresh new insight into the sordid world of international crime and power.

Frank DiPascali, the finance chief at Bernard Madoff’s investment advisory business who agreed to plead guilty, could help prosecutors build criminal cases against other players in his boss’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme.

DiPascali, 52, is scheduled to enter his plea tomorrow in federal court in Manhattan, U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin told a judge in an Aug. 8 letter that didn’t specify the charges. DiPascali would waive indictment and plead guilty, which signals to lawyers that he is cooperating to lessen his prison term.

"I believe he’s cooperating," said John J. Fahy, a former federal prosecutor not involved in the case. "He would be very valuable to the government because he has been close to Madoff for so many years and had to have seen some of the fraudulent transactions that went on. From what we know of Madoff, he trusted very few people."

Madoff, of course, has gone off to prison without really telling anyone where the bodies are buried, where the money went, or even who on Wall Street knew and facilitated his scheme. 

We won’t know for some time how cooperative DiPascali will be, but if he is cooperative, and if he does know where even a few of the bodies are buried, his cooperation might free up information that is otherwise, thus far, successfully buried.

Here’s John Taplin, writing in January, about what cracking open the Madoff scandal might reveal.

The Wall Street Journal is very careful with the libel laws, but I am increasingly confident that their reporters are beginning to sense that organized crime sits somewhere in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme. The tipoff come from their classic tabloid use of the “made man’s” street name in quotes (like Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel). The main feeder fund to Madoff was Cohmad Securities.

Cohmad, a conjunction of the last names of investor Maurice “Sonny” Cohn and Mr. Madoff, carried especially tight ties. Cohmad was filled by employees with long-term or family relationships with the Madoffs, and its operations were enmeshed in the main Madoff businesses, interviews and records show.

Maurice “Sonny” Cohn and his associate Alvin “Sonny” Delaire have both been accused of playing fast and loose with securities regulations. As anyone who has watched Godfather II, Meyer Lansky’s great dream was to get “legit”–to move dirty money into clean securities.  I have already written about how no one has come forward to make a claim on much of the money the flowed to Madoff from South America. If the whole scheme was some vast money laundering operation, then the actual investment return part of it was less important to many of the customers. According to an SEC complaint, Madoff maintained two bank accounts at JPMorganChase and three at Bank of America Mellon. At the end of every reporting period, Madoff’s CFO  Frank DiPascali, reportedly converted its holdings to cash equivalents, i.e. treasury bills, to avoid SEC disclosure requirements.

Note, Taplin draws an analogy to something that others have drawn analogies to Edmonds’ own revelations: BCCI (given the timing, I’ve been wondering the same thing myself).

Just about the time that Madoff’s scheme started up, the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) went out of business.

BCCI became the focus in 1991 of one of the largest scandals in world financial history. Due to the massive fraud and corruption at the heart of the bank, it was described as a “$20-billion-plus heist”.^[3] Regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom found it to be involved in money laundering, bribery, support of terrorism,^[4] arms trafficking, the sale of nuclear technologies, the commission and facilitation of tax evasion, smuggling, illegal immigration, and the illicit purchases of banks and real estate. The bank was found to have at least $13 billion unaccounted for. The bank’s relationship with underworld elements led to the nickname “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International.”

With BCCI closed down, maybe Bernie and his partners saw a market opportunity.

If the Madoff Ponzi was a big money-laundering venture for Colombian and Russian mobsters, as many have suggested, and DiPascali knew it and details of the scheme, then things might get interesting.

I do hope the Feds are watching out for DiPascali’s safety…

Update: I’ve been reliably informed that Schumer made the comments to the NYT on Thursday, before his Friday meeting with POTUS.

Since I’ve been obsessing about all the excess brush in TX now that we have a President who insists on working in August, I’ve been tracking Obama’s schedule very closely. And so I noticed on Friday that Chuck Schumer had a late afternoon meeting in the Oval Office that was closed to the Press.

Just Chuck Schumer.

I found that rather odd, since Schumer’s Chairmanship–of Rules–isn’t necessarily one that would be of interest to the President. Unlike the House, for example, the Senate Rules Committee isn’t going to have significant say over how a bill–health care, for example–comes up for a vote. [Update: I’m increasingly convinced this is wrong: Rules might be critical if they tried to do health care in reconciliation.]

And while there are a number of things buzzing in NY–notably, the confirmation of NY’s Sonia Sotomayor and US Attorney and former Schumer aide Preet Bharara–that might concern both the White House and NY’s senior Senator. But on a lot of those issues, some other Committee Chair would be involved (such as Pat Leahy for judiciary issues), which make it less likely that’s what the White House wanted to chat to Schumer and just Schumer about. Furthermore, some issues (such as Carolyn Maloney’s decision not to challenge Kristen Gillibrand) would be more appropriate in a non-official venue.

So I’ve been assuming that Schumer got called to the White House because he has a unique ability to get things done in the Senate. That’s partly by virtue of his past tenure as DSCC Chair; thirteen Senators owe their position to Schumer, including a number of moderates (Sheehan, Warner, Hagen, Franken, Udall, Udall, Merkley, Begich, McCaskill, Webb, Tester, Brown, Casey, and Whitehouse). He’s the kind of guy who, if he were majority leader, would be tremendously effective and would have a lot of chits to call in on key legistlative battles. Oh, and he’s also on the Finance Committee–the committee on which six totally unrepresentative Senators are holding healthcare hostage.

Which is why I’m curious to see these comments from Schumer. (h/t Americablog)

“If they can’t do it by Sept. 15th, I think the overwhelming view on the Democratic side is going to be, then, they’re never going to get it done,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, observed in a separate interview. “And there’s always a worry that, you know, delay, delay, delay, you lose any momentum whatsoever.”

[snip]

On the “public option,” Mr. Schumer said, “if you call it a co-op but it meets certain criteria — it’s available on Day 1, it’s available to everybody, it has the strength to go up against the big insurance companies and the big suppliers to bring down prices — fine.

“If it’s going to be a measly little thing that’s just a fig leaf, not fine,” Mr. Schumer said.

[snip]

“The proof of the pudding in this is not going to be who votes for it, if you have Republicans or not,” said Mr. Schumer, who is heavily favored to win a third term in 2010. “It’s going to be when it passes and when it goes into effect: does it work?”

(Actually, now that I think of it, the Rules Committee might be able to toy with the way "reconciliation" is understood, which would have to be used in a Democrats-only bill.)

You see, coming from any other Senator, I’d consider this just one more comment amid a sea of comments about what might happen in the Senate. But coming from Schumer, coming just days after his curious meeting with Obama on Friday, I suspect this is a line in the sand. 

Harry Reid might not get us there, but Chuck Schumer might.