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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector-Who's Lane McCotter?
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illustration by Jason Stout
Who is Lane McCotter, and what exactly was he doing in Iraq?
As of this writing, no congressional committee has asked that question, but sooner or later, they'll have to. It is a question that may bring down the Bush administration. This is why.
George W. Bush promises that all prisoners in Iraq are covered and protected by the Geneva Convention, which states (Section 1, Article 17): "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."
Yet someone identified by The New York Times (May 15) as a "senior military official" at U.S. headquarters in Baghdad says, "There are reasonable people and very intelligent people who can differ on what is authorized, what's permissible under the Geneva Convention." No there aren't. Read it again: "No physical or mental torture, or any other form of coercion ... unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." Another provision reads: "Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment shall be prohibited at any time." There's no room for argument. The "senior military official" in Baghdad was dispensing disinformation – lying.
In that vein, it is interesting that U.S. military lawyers were excluded from determining procedures in Iraq, as the Los Angeles Times reported on May 14. Scott Horton, former chairman of the New York City Bar Association committee that filed a brief on Iraqi interrogations earlier this month, said that senior military lawyers "were extremely upset. They said they were being shut out of the process, and that civilian political lawyers, not the military lawyers, were writing these new rules of engagement [for interrogation]." Remember that the chief White House counsel called the Geneva accords "obsolete." The LA Times goes on: "The military lawyers complained that the Pentagon was 'creating an atmosphere of legal ambiguity,' Horton said. 'What's happened is not an accident. It is exactly what they [the military lawyers] were warning about a year ago.'"
Which brings us to Lane McCotter. Do a Web search on McCotter and you'll come across an article in the March 4 newsletter The Utah Sheriff featuring a photo taken last year of Lane McCotter giving a tour of the Abu Ghraib prison to none other than Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man Paul Wolfowitz. So: Who's McCotter, and what was he doing in Iraq?
According to a NY Times report on May 8, Lane McCotter was an MP in Vietnam who eventually rose to the rank of colonel. His last Army assignment was as warden of the Army's central prison at Fort Leavenworth. In civilian life he eventually became director of the Utah Department of Corrections, a post he resigned under pressure 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." McCotter later became a top executive in a private prison company that ran a Sante Fe jail that was "under investigation by the Justice Department" for "unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates."
Here comes the good part:
While he and his company were under investigation by the Justice Department, the department's chief, Attorney General John Ashcroft, hand-picked McCotter to "rebuild [Iraq's] criminal justice system." (NY Times) Inhale that: Ashcroft selected a man his own department was investigating, a man who had to leave the top corrections post in Utah or face scrutiny for what can only be called torture. And that's what inner-circle Republicans are so frightened of: If the prison abuse investigation gets to Ashcroft, it gets to the White House.
It would seem that McCotter was chosen not in spite of his record but because of it. It's likely that Ashcroft and Wolfowitz, and the people they report to (Rumsfeld and Bush), knew exactly who they were hiring and what was expected of him. It was McCotter who, in the parlance of The NY Times, "directed Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards." The guards McCotter trained did the infamous things, took the infamous photographs. What did Ashcroft say when he appointed McCotter? This: "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights." Orwell would chortle. When The NY Times (May 8) queried why McCotter was hired even though he was under investigation, the Justice Department didn't return the calls. Hard to blame them. What could Justice possibly say?
Twelve days later, Justice lamely told ABC News that "the department was aware of the background of the men [McCotter and John J. Armstrong, who has an even worse record]. ... The official said they were among the few who were willing to go."
The hiring of McCotter sheds more light on what Gen. Janis Karpinski, nominally in charge of Abu Ghraib, told Aaron Brown on CNN, May 10: "I don't think there was anything improper done. Because there wasn't a violation of procedure. This was something they [the guards] were instructed to do as a new procedure." A general officer in the U.S. Army said that. Those gruesome photos record a procedure the guards were trained to do. By military intelligence? By McCotter? Both? Eventually, McCotter and Ashcroft must be called to testify. Wolfowitz, too. What did he learn on McCotter's tour? If Wolfowitz knew, Rumsfeld did, but what and how much? What Rumsfeld and Ashcroft knew, Bush knew or (just as bad) should have known.
And then other pieces fall into place. The NY Times, May 7: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Human Rights First all report that they complained of Iraqi prisoner maltreatment to Coalition Provisional Authority boss L. Paul Bremer III and Condoleezza Rice, who shined them on – which again takes the abuse case straight to the White House. The LA Times, May 9: "[T]he recently resigned, handpicked Iraqi human rights minister was quoted as saying that he notified L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, in November of possible prisoner abuse, 'but there was no answer.' The minister was not even allowed to visit the prisons." Bremer knew what he would see. When our top commanders in Iraq, Gens. Abizaid and Sanchez, testified to Congress on May 19 that they knew nothing of the Red Cross reports, either they were lying, or top-level civilians like Rice and Bremer kept the reports from them.
And our poor troops? The disregard for our soldiers by this administration is in some ways the greatest disgrace of all. The NY Times, May 9: "Army doctrine calls for a military brigade to handle about 4,000 prisoners. But a single battalion – about a third of the size of a brigade – was handling 6,000 to 7,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib." That's what happens when Bush refuses to commit the necessary number of troops to Iraq because it would look bad politically. The pressure on our people in uniform was horrendous. Undertrained and mal-trained, and under fire the whole time – Abu Ghraib was regularly the target of bombardments – they were ordered to do the impossible. Instead, they did the unthinkable. And it will hang over them all their lives, as it should, while the people they trusted, the people who put this system in place – Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Bremer – spout platitudes and avoid accountability ... so far.
The LA Times, May 11: "Most Arrested by 'Mistake' – Coalition Intelligence Put Numbers at 70% to 90% of Iraqi prisoners." The Red Cross, which "made 29 visits to Coalition-run prisons and camps between late March and November of last year, said it repeatedly presented its reports of mistreatment to prison commanders, U.S. military officials in Iraq and members of the Bush administration in Washington." (Why hasn't the Red Cross been called to testify?) In a separate story the same day: "US Army officials have acknowledged detaining women in hopes of persuading male relatives to provide information. ... Interrogators sometimes threatened to kill [the innocent women] detainees."
Kidnapping and threatening people's wives. Blackmail. Indiscriminate arrests. Torture. But when Rumsfeld and his generals are asked who, exactly, was in real command of Abu Ghraib, they claim not to know even that, while their so-called commander in chief claims complete ignorance of every issue in this affair.
If that's the truth, they're incompetent. If it's not, they're war criminals.
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http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-05-28/cols_ventura.html
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Prison Abuse Investigators Question Hiring of Former Utah Prison Boss
May. 16, 2004SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- U.S. Justice Department officials have come under fire for hiring a former Utah prison boss with a history of human rights complaints to oversee prisons in Iraq.
O. Lane McCotter, 63, was in Baghdad from May to September last year overseeing the reconstruction of Abu Ghraib as part of a team picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft. He was corrections director in Texas from 1985-87, New Mexico from 1987-91 and Utah from 1992-97.
McCotter advocated the use of restraining chairs in Utah prisons, causing the death in 1997 of a mentally ill inmate who spent 16 hours strapped to one. He resigned from his post two months later, and the department subsequently stopped using the chairs.
In October 1988, a court-appointed prison monitor accused New Mexico state prison officials of erasing a portion of a videotape of a prison disturbance to cover up acts of brutality. McCotter accused the prison monitor of "fabricating atrocities," and said he believed the tape erasure was accidental.
McCotter's critics say the pictures of abuse and humiliation at Abu Ghraib are eerily similar to video and written records that detail the plight of bound and naked Utah prisoners in the former isolation chamber at Utah's Point of the Mountain prison.
"If our government had a serious commitment to the humane treatment of prisoners, why would they send somebody to Iraq with a history of hostility to prisoner rights?" Carol Gnade, a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Utah who battled McCotter, told the Salt Lake Tribune. "What it shows is the U.S. government really doesn't take civil rights abuses in our own prison systems seriously."
McCotter has condemned the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, but told the Tribune he's also angry about sweeping condemnations of the U.S. military.
"We worked with military police every day," McCotter said. "We traveled with them, they helped us, and they provided the security so we could get (Abu Ghraib) open and operational ... The military police are literally on the front lines every day in Iraq. They were absolutely essential to everything we were doing."
McCotter has said his primary duty in Iraq was to evaluate the structural status of the prisons, and that he did not train guards.
Congress, meanwhile, is asking questions about how Ashcroft, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chose the civil contractors who worked with the military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib.
Lawmakers also want to know how Ashcroft found McCotter, whose selection is reviving outrage about the spotty history of human rights in U.S. prisons.
McCotter insists he can't recall who from the Bush administration asked him to go to Iraq.
"I'm retired military, my name probably surfaced from that," he says. "I got a call from them and they said I'd been recommended. I have no idea who."
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?nid=5&sid=94232
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Exporting America's Prison Problems
In 1997, a 29-year-old schizophrenic inmate named Michael Valent was stripped naked and strapped to a restraining chair by Utah prison staff because he refused to take a pillowcase off his head. Shortly after he was released some sixteen hours later, Valent collapsed and died from a blood clot that blocked an artery to his heart.
The chilling incident made national news not only because it happened to be videotaped but also because Valent's family successfully sued the State of Utah and forced it to stop using the device. Director of the Utah Department of Corrections, Lane McCotter, who was named in the suit and defended use of the chair, resigned in the ensuing firestorm.
Some six years later, Lane McCotter was working in Abu Ghraib prison, part of a four-man team of correctional advisers sent by the Justice Department and charged with the sensitive mission of reconstructing Iraq's notorious prisons, ravaged by decades of human rights abuse.
While McCotter left Iraq shortly before the current scandal at Abu Ghraib began and says he had nothing to do with the MPs who committed the atrocities, his very presence there raises serious questions about US handling of the Iraqi prison system.
It's bad enough that the Justice Department picked McCotter – whose reputation in Utah was at best controversial and at worst disturbing. But further, the Justice Department hired him less than three months after its own civil rights division released a shocking 36-page report documenting inhumane conditions at a New Mexico jail, run by the company where McCotter is an executive. Here was a man whose prisons had been plagued by reports of inmate mistreatment for nearly a decade. "Lane McCotter's administration here had a horrifying record on human rights" said Carol Gnade, who was executive director of the ACLU in Salt Lake City between 1990 and 2002.
Indeed, around the same time Michael Valent died, Jensie Anderson, then a lawyer for the group, interviewed close to forty mentally ill inmates who had also been restrained in the chair. "We found out they were being kept there far longer than necessary," says Anderson. "There were cases where inmates ended up sitting in their own feces. They were being tortured."
Shortly after Valent's family went to court, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against three Utah DOC doctors, this time for binding a mentally ill man, naked save his underwear, to a stainless steel pallet called 'the board' for 85 straight days. The case was settled out of court, according to newspaper reports. "Generally, under McCotter's rule, human rights were not respected," notes Anderson. "After he left, things improved a great deal."
But they were soon to become worse in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where county officials decided to hire Management & Training Corporation, a private, Utah-based corrections company, to run its jail. McCotter, as it happened, now worked as MTC's director of corrections business development. In August 2001 McCotter, once secretary of corrections in New Mexico, traveled to Santa Fe to finalize MTC's three-year contract to operate the Santa Fe County Detention Center.
Less than a year later, a team of Justice Department correctional experts was inside the Santa Fe jail investigating civil rights violations. In March 2003, their report concluded that certain conditions violated inmates' constitutional rights, and that inmates suffered "harm or the risk of serious harm" from, among other things, woeful deficiencies in healthcare and basic living conditions. The report documented numerous and horrifying examples, and threatened a lawsuit if things didn't get better. Amid the fallout, the Justice Department pulled its approximately 100 federal prisoners out of Santa Fe and MTC fired its warden and pressured its medical subcontractor, Physicians Network Association, to ax one of its medical administrators.
Then, on May 20, in a case of unfathomable irony, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that McCotter, along with three other corrections experts, had gone to Iraq. The very same day, Justice Department lawyers began their first negotiations with Santa Fe County officials over the extensive changes needed at the jail to avoid legal action.
The Justice Department won't comment on why it chose McCotter, whose company has been hounded by well-publicized and ongoing healthcare, security and personnel problems at many of the thirteen prisons it operates in the United States, Australia and Canada. Meanwhile, the Ontario provincial government is currently investigating an inmate death at MTC's Canadian prison on May 5, and inquests into three other mysterious deaths over the past year are expected, according to an article in the Barrie Examiner.
In a May 7 statement, McCotter emphasized that he was mainly in Iraq to oversee the structural renovation of Iraqi prisons and to train Iraqi citizens for correctional duties. He stated that there were no inmates at Abu Ghraib while he was there and that he never supervised military personnel.
According to Gary DeLand, also a member of the correctional team and McCotter's predecessor at the Utah DOC, the two of them worked along with embattled Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski and MPs from various battalions, but that "none of the faces on television look familiar."
DeLand says the Justice Department paid him $8,500 per month while he was in Iraq before bumping his salary up to $12,000 per month toward the end of the four-month trip. He defends McCotter as "one of the very best corrections administrators I've ever met."
Judy Greene, a prison reform consultant, disagrees. "There are any number of correctional administrators, active or retired, that have good records and whom I would have rather seen tapped by the Justice Department for this kind of assignment. McCotter is no expert on how prisoners should be treated or on how prison staff should be trained."
Interestingly, Chase Riveland, former secretary of corrections in Washington and Colorado, who Greene says is respected both by prison reformists and corrections administrators, turned down an offer to join the Justice Department's team. "The philosophies of the individuals that were going did not match mine," Riveland told The Nation.
While it seems unlikely Lane McCotter was involved in the unfolding abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, his hiring – given his troubled history and current employment at the equally troubled MTC – is yet another example of the unending and unabashed bumbling of the occupation. Perhaps most important, if this is the type of personnel decision we can expect from critical agencies like the Justice Department, there's probably more scandal to come.
Dan Frosch is a freelance journalist based in New York City.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18682
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The Salt Lake Tribune, 1991Lane McCotter, who oversaw the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison, once ran prisons in Utah.
Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?ex=1086235200&en=c17bf43b33a3cbba&ei=5070
Ashcroft's Connection to Abu Ghraib
http://www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives/000732.html
Prison abuse also occurs in U.S., insiders say
Ex-Utah official reopened Abu Ghraib in Iraq
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