Texas is again the source of bad policy: Iraq & prisoner mistreatment

Ex-head of TDCJ set up Iraq jail

A civilian charged with preparing Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison for U.S. military use headed the Texas prison system during one of its most controversial periods and later resigned as director of Utah prisons after an inmate died while shackled naked to a chair.

Lane McCotter, now director of business development for a private prison company, Management & Training Corp., says he never trained U.S. military personnel working in Iraq's prisons and turned over the management of Abu Ghraib to military officials before the United States began housing prisoners there.

But Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, is urging Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate how civilians such as McCotter were chosen to oversee the opening of prisons in Iraq -- noting that McCotter is an executive for a company operating a private prison in New Mexico that the Justice Department criticized last year for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates.

McCotter returned to the United States in early September after four months of work in Iraq, first evaluating and then preparing the country's prisons for reopening. The first documented abuses in Abu Ghraib prison occurred in October.

In a statement, McCotter said he had nothing to do with training military personnel to run the prisons.

But Schumer wants to know how someone with McCotter's "checkered record" was appointed to the team Ashcroft dispatched to Iraq to help rebuild its judicial system.

"There are many questions begging for answers," Schumer said last week. "Mr. McCotter 's selection also raises serious questions about the role that was played by civilian advisers in setting prison policies, designing training programs for prison guards and directly influencing the environment in which the horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib took place."


http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2572688

My comment: Cronyism once again overrides a process that demands an even balance between objectives and diplomacy.

Why does the ills of this country have its roots in Texas?

Also, I believe that Bush's success to portray himself as a strong presidential candidate in 2000 is largely attributed to the fabric of lies created by his supporters in Texas when he was governor of that state. His anti-crime policies and anti-social programs may have endeared him to Republicans, but the disasterous results of those policies were kept hushed, hushed until after he won the presidency.

Think about all those favors he owes people out there for creating a false image of a strong leader. It has all been smoke and mirrors.

This gives everyone who lives in Texas a bad name. But I've been voting against GW Bush since 1994.

Bush breathed life back into Ashcrofts political life after he lost to a dead man. He loves bush*.

Nobody involved thought there was anything unusual about treating prisoners this way, since prisoners in the US are treated just like this.

What the world press found so apalling was just another day in the US "justice" system