Your daily dose of irony: “Based on a comprehensive review of available information as of mid-March 2009, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported 14 percent as the overall rate of former Guantanamo detainees confirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist activities.”

You can read more about it at ABC, here’s the actual report.

You may remember that earlier this month, leaders of the health care industry went to the White House to promise President Obama that they would cut health care costs.  This commitment was intended to establish a good-faith relationship and to show all observers that the health care industry was being proactive about controlling costs.  Now health care companies are hedging on the commitments they made to the President, arguing that they will be ruled as a violation of antitrust law.  That’s what happened to former President Bill Clinton’s voluntary cost-control program in 1993.  Read the full New York Times article here.

As we reported last week, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) is adament about playing a key role in the confirmation process for President Obama’s nominee to succeed Justice David Souter.  Listening to him talk last week, one might have expected him to be tougher on Obama’s eventual pick, but here’s his statement regarding Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor:

I applaud the nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Her confirmation would add needed diversity in two ways: the first Hispanic and the third woman to serve on the high court,” Specter said. “While her record suggests excellent educational and professional qualifications, now it is up to the Senate to discharge its constitutional duty for a full and fair confirmation process.

A federal judge in Florida on Tuesday sentenced Orlando “businessman� Frank Amodeo to 22 years in prison for stealing $181 million in payroll taxes – one of the largest employment tax frauds in U.S. history.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Gold in the Middle District of Florida, a tax and money-laundering specialist, prosecuted the case. Gold will be regaling his colleagues for years about this one.

A diminutive disbarred lawyer with a messiah complex, Amodeo owned a Lear jet and once predicted he would dominate world business. 

In fact, Amodeo was pocketing withholding taxes that he was supposed to be remitting to the Internal Revenue Service through a web of payroll check processing companies he owned. He pleaded guilty to five felony charges last September. At a sentencing hearing earlier this month, a psychiatrist testified that Amodeo was ”manic, delusional and grandiose” and “mentally ill,” the Orlando Sentinel reported.

But it was Amodeo’s high-profile political activities that made the case especially weird.

He owned a shadowy “security consulting� firm that sent three employees – including an ex-Secret Service agent named Kevin Billings – to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006 to guard a dual U.S.-Congolese citizen named Oscar Kashala, who was running for president.

Billings and two other Amodeo employees were thrown into jail on trumped-up charges of trying to overthrow the government. After their release, they flew to Paris, where Amodeo’s jet picked them up for a return flight to Florida.

Kashala, the failed Congolese presidential candidate, also was a client of the Washington lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide.  Through Kashala, Amodeo hired Dutko to assist him with international business deals. Dutko lobbyist Sally Painter, a former Clinton Commerce Department official active in North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion issues, tapped him for $100,000 to sponsor a NATO conference in Riga, Latvia in 2006.

 That $100,000 contribution — plus another $5000 he donated to the Republican Party of Florida the day before — got Amodeo into a meeting at the White House in October 2006, where he sat two seats down from President Bush at a meeting to discuss an upcoming NATO summit in Latvia. 

 At the time, Amodeo was under active Justice Department investigation in Florida for the missing withholding taxes. He was known to be erratic and manic, a string of lawsuits alleging fraud had been filed against him, he’d been disbarred as a lawyer, and had already been convicted once of felony fraud in Georgia. Moreover, his company’s murky foray into Congolese politics had been on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel. But the Secret Service still let Amodeo into the White House to sit with the president. Good work, Secret Service.

As for Dutko’s Painter, she later told me for this profile I wrote of her for the Wall Street Journal she’d had no idea of Amodeo’s criminal jeopardy. After his lobbying contract expired, Dutko sued him for failing to pay his bill. The case was settled.

 Read a copy of Amodeo’s indictment here. The Orlando Sentinel’s stories on Amodeo are here. He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge John Antoon II.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales went on CNN’s “Situation Room” this afternoon to talk about the Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination, but Wolf Blitzer had other plans. He wanted to know about Gonzo’s role in authorizing the harsh interrogation methods used against suspected terrorists, and the former attorney general was quick to point fingers.

Gonzo — who was the White House legal counsel when Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury wrote some of their memos — told Blitzer he wasn’t at the Justice Department when interrogation policies were first devised.

“It’s the responsibility of the Department of Justice to provide legal guidance on behalf of the executive branch,” Gonzo said on CNN, failing to mention his role in approving interrogation methods as White House counsel.

Attorney General Eric Holder will jet off to Rome Thursday for the G8 Justice and Home Affairs Ministers’ Meeting, according to the Justice Department.

His three day trip to Italy won’t exactly be a Roman holiday though with a series of meetings scheduled with his G8 counterparts in addition to European Commissioner Jacques Barrot, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa and United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute Director Sandro Calvani, as well as the Czech Republic justice minister, whose country currently holds the European Union presidency, according to the G8 Summit 2009 Web site.

The first meeting on Friday will focus on “the struggle against transnational organized crime through a common international strategy designed to combat mafioso assets and to counter today’s ‘multinational crime corporations,’” the Web site said.

Also on Friday, Holder and others will discuss “the issue of migration, dwelling in particular on illegal immigration, on human trafficking and on immigrants’ integration with society,” according to the Web site.

The third meeting on Saturday will start by examining “urban security” and later explore international terrorism, the Web site said. After this meeting, the officials gathered will develop plans for international cooperation on the topics discussed and hold a press conference, according to the Web site.

Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo jumped into the debate today over President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court saying “empathy has won out over excellence” on his American Enterprise Institute blog.

Yoo said she had a strong resume, but he criticized President Obama for choosing Sotomayor over “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein, Solicitor General Elena Kagan or U.S. Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood.

“The White House chose a judge distinguished from the other members of that list only by her race,” Yoo wrote. “Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.”

Yoo then called on Republican senators to question her vote to uphold a Connecticut affirmative action program. He added that he has already signed an amicus brief challenging her vote.

“Conservatives should defend the Supreme Court as a place where cases are decided by a faithful application of the Constitution, not personal politics, backgrounds, and feelings,” he wrote. “Republican senators will have to conduct thorough questioning in the confirmation hearings to make sure that she will not be a results-oriented voter, voting her emotions and politics rather than the law.”

A senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section was named a 2009 “top prosecutor” by the Women in Federal Law Enforcement professional organization.

Kristy Parker won federal convictions last year against three Kentucky jail guards who locked an 18-year-old traffic offender in a cell with violent inmates who raped and assaulted him. The details of the victim’s ordeal were harrowing:

From today’s DOJ news release:

The victim was arrested on Valentine’s Day, 2003, and taken to the Grant County, Ky., Detention Center. A sergeant and several officers teased the teenager at the jail and after announcing he needed to be “taught a lesson,” visited a jail cell filled with hardened criminals and told them that they would be bringing down a young man who needed to be “messed” with. The officers then escorted him down a hallway lined with cells filled with hardcore criminals, as inmates yelled, “Fresh Meat!”; “Give him to me!” and “Happy Valentine’s Day!” The officers pushed the boy into the cell, slammed the door shut and left him without looking back. In the next hours the boy was viciously raped by an inmate and abused by others.

The 2008 case was United States v. Sydnor, et al. Parker convinced reluctant law enforcement witnesses to cooperate, the DOJ says, and presented an emotionally powerful case that turned around a jury initially hestitant to convict. 

Parker has been with the Justice Department ten years. She will accept the award at a banquet in Tuscon, Ariz., on June 17. Her award marks the third consecutive year in which Women in Federal Law Enforcement has selected a Civil Rights Division Criminal Section attorney as its top prosecutor, the DOJ says:

Last year, Deputy Chief Paige Fitzgerald received the award for her successful cold case prosecution of James Ford Seale, a former Ku Klux Klansman, for the racially-motivated murders of two young black men killed in Mississippi more than 40 years earlier. Deputy Chief Bobbi Bernstein was named WIFLE’s top prosecutor in 2007 for her role in the case of United States v. Saldana, et al., a prosecution marking the first – and to date, the only – use of federal criminal civil rights statutes to prosecute violent hate crimes carried out by members of a traditional street gang.

Four former Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisoners have shined a light on some of their darkest days in a series of recent interviews reported by CNN and The Washington Post.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former prisoner who goes by the alias Abu Ahmed, a former detainee only identified as Amir and Lakhdar Boumediene described the harsh interrogation methods used against them.

Zaeef, a former associate of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, told CNN that U.S. officials beat him and put him into the snow at Bagram Air Base until he was unconscious. He was later transferred to Guantanamo Bay, and released in 2006 after more than three years in detention, CNN reported.

Ahmed, who served a 20 month detention beginning in 2003, told CNN that he was forced to live without clothes at Abu Ghraib for 32 days.

Amir, who was detained from 2003 to 2004 in Abu Ghraib, told CNN he had a collar put around him and forced to howl like a dog. Another time, he was sodomized with a broomstick, according to CNN.

Boumediene, who was recently released to France after seven years at Guantanamo Bay, was “roughly (lifted) from the chair where he was strapped, so the shackles dug into his flesh” during his interrogations, according to The Post.

In the old days, back when we reporters worked for big media companies and earned real salaries, we used to do things like “report” stories. Now we don’t always have enough time to dig. So, dear readers — help us out here. Can anyone shed light on who’s been recommended for the two U.S. Attorney jobs in Mississippi? Email us at tips@mainjustice.com

A spokesman for Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told Main Justice’s Andrew Ramonas last week that Thompson had already made his recommendations to the White House, but he declined to give the names. Thompson is in charge of the selections because Mississippi’s two senators, Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker, are both Republicans.

Rep. Bennie Thompson

Here are the names we’ve heard for the Northern District: Circuit Court Judge Thomas Gardner of Tupelo and Oxford attorney Christi McCoy. We’ve heard rumors – but can’t confirm — that McCoy may have hit some kind of snag in the vetting process. Through an aide, all Gardner would say is that he “has no way of confirming” any information about his potential candidacy. McCoy did not return a phone call seeking comment. We also heard Cindy Mitchell of Clarksdale mentioned for the post.

For the Southern District, the names we’ve heard are Kathy Nester, a Jackson attorney; Deborah McDonald, a lawyer in Natchez; and Dorsey Carson of Jackson. Mississippi bloggers have also mentioned  Constance Slaughter-Harvey of Forest. Slaughter-Harvey is an old friend of Thompson and was the first black woman to graduate from the University of Mississippi law school.