The Washington Post has a brief piece describing Mike Mukasey's new gig.
Mr. Mukasey will bring his skill sets to Debevoise & Plimpton, where he will [no, I am not making this up]:
... work on behalf of corporate boards and oversee companies that have run afoul of the law as an independent monitor.
Given his independence in settings as varied as torture, Executive branch crime, surveillance law violations, enforcement of Congressional subpeonas, etc., how will companies that have "run afoul" of the law feel about the opportunity to have Mr. Mukasey serve as their "independent monitor?"
A look at the company he will be keeping at Debevoise & Plimpton might help those companies decide:
... he will join a full roster of former government heavyweights, including onetime Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and former U.K. Attorney General Lord Goldsmith
Mary Jo White was the CIA and Michael Scheuer's "go to" for help in devising the Clinton era approach of "Outsourcing Torture."
... Scheuer ...spoke openly for the first time about how he and several other top C.I.A. officials set up the program, in the mid-nineties. "It was begun in desperation, " he told me. ... His unit spent much of 1996 studying how Al Qaeda operated; by the next year, Scheuer said, its mission was to try to capture bin Laden and his associates. He recalled, "We went to the White House"—which was then occupied by the Clinton Administration—"and they said, ‘Do it.’ " He added that Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council, offered no advice. "He told me, ‘Figure it out by yourselves,’ " Scheuer said. (Clarke did not respond to a request for comment.)
Scheuer sought the counsel of Mary Jo White, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who, along with a small group of F.B.I. agents, was pursuing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case.
...
Describing the C.I.A.’s frustration, Scheuer said, "We were turning into voyeurs. We knew where these people were, but we couldn’t capture them because we had nowhere to take them." The agency realized that "we had to come up with a third party."
The obvious choice, Scheuer said, was Egypt.
So Mary Jo White, apparently acting as her own OLC and circumventing the need for a Yoo or Bradbury, was somehow able to provide the CIA with counsel on how to outsource "handling" by shipment to Egypt. Egypt, with it's known predilections, was as the "obvious" choice and why not? For example, at about the same time White, as a United States Attorney, was providing counsel to Scheuer on how outsourcing to Egypt, the intelligence services in Egypt were enjoying a great deal of success with their technicques. Who wouldn't, after all, be impressed by the story of the "Boy Spies?"
From Lawrence Wright's, The Looming Tower the story emerges:
Mubarak’s security forces fanned out all across Egypt ... Houses were burned. Suspects disappeared. Sometimes a mother was dragged out on the street and stripped naked, and her children were warned that she would be raped if their brother was not present the next time they came. ...Five new prisons were built ...
To deal with Zawahiri, Egyptian intelligence agents devised a fiendish plan. They lured a thirteen-year-old boy named Ahmed into an apartment with the promise of juice and videos. Ahmed was the son of ... a senior member of al-Jihad. The boy was drugged and sodomized, when he awakened, he was confronted with photographs of the homosecual activity and threatened ...
Egyptian intelligence forced him to recruit another child, Mus’ab, whose father ... was also in al-Jihad and served as the treasurer for al-Qaeda. Mus’ab endured the same humiliating initiation of drugs and sexual abuse and was forced to turn against his family. The agents taught the boys how to plant microphones in their own homes and photograph documents. A number of arrests followed because of the information produced by the boy spies.
The Egyptian agents then decided to use the boys to kill Zawahiri. ..
p. 215
As noted in the WaPo article, Mukasey will also be joining former UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, central figure in the BAE scandal. Lord Goldsmith effectively shut down an investigation into bribery involving BAE and a close friend of the Bush family and was alleged to have ordered British investigators to conceal evidence (in the name of national security):
The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, today denied ordering British investigators to conceal from an international anti-bribery watchdog more than £1 billion in secret payments allegedly made to a Saudi prince.
The payments were allegedly received by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, from BAE Systems for setting up the £40 billion Al Yamamah arms deal in the 1980s with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence.
In theory it may be difficult for a man like Mukasey to leave his role with the Bush White House and find a comparable, comfortable niche - but for once practice seems easier than theory.
Congrats to all involved.