A snip from TPM on Asscrack's tangential involvement in the torture:

An uncomfortable backdrop to the Abu Ghraib story is the knowledge that various sorts of abuse are endemic throughout the American prison system. Along those lines, here's a clip from a piece
in Saturday's Times by Fox Butterfield: "The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

This administration is rotten from the top to the bottom down to its despicable core. They should all be at the Hague in chains. They are absolutely shameless.

:argh:

I know residents of a nearby cemetery that less rotten than this administration and its henchmen. "Evildoers" indeed.

On Edit: Here's the link to the DOJ announcement sending McCotter, et al to Iraq as a Corrections Advisor:

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2003/May/03_ag_267.htm

abuse, corruption and crime.

I'm sitting here ticking off the names of newspapers to send this to for someone to follow up and write a story and NO ONE comes to mind.

Its very sad. :-(

this is what will happen to Americans once the dictatorship kicks in
this country.

http://www.slweekly.com/editorial/1997/city_970424a.cfm

Naturally, they devised a cover-up, which didn't hold up after the autopsy:

SNIP
Spokesman Jack Ford insisted that Valent had been banging his head against the wall in his cell and was a danger to himself. Ford told news reporters that prison officials could not force-medicate inmates because a court ruling forbid it.

Last week, both those declarations were found to be untrue. An autopsy revealed that there was no evidence that Valent had banged his head. The autopsy, however, did cite The Chair as the cause of his death. An investigation by Richard Shepherd, deputy district attorney, also failed to turn up any evidence that Valent was banging his head or attempting to kill himself.

In an interview, Ford would not take responsibility for the falsehoods. "That’s what we were told," he said about the head-banging story.

SNIP
Carol Gnade, the director of the Utah Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, was somber about the finding: "It’s obvious they have been lying to us about the use of The Chair. It makes the already tragic situation even more so."