We've been asking this question for weeks....why did Attorney General John Ashcroft pick Lance McCotter to set up U.S. prisons in Iraq? The New York Times has been on top of the story as well. Sunday, the paper asks the question again. It was McCotter, whose chequered past in prison administration is startlingly abysmal, who picked Abu Ghraib to be the main prison and then directed its reconstruction. Neither the Justice Department nor McCotter will answer.

This is a gruesome article, but it's necessary reading. And, doesn't this sound familiar? In the case of one inmate in McCotter's jail who hung himself:

...when a guard noticed Mr. Johnson had hanged himself, the officer on duty first went looking for a camera to record the scene, rather than cut Mr. Johnson down. "The response of the jail was to protect themselves by taking pictures rather than to save his life," [Johnson's attorney] Mr. Haas said.