Prison abuses ’had precedents’

AT LEAST five US officials given the job of organising Iraq’s prison system following the war have been linked to abuses of inmates at jails in the US, German NDR public television said today.

In an advance extract of its Panorama program, the station said that the US Justice Department had sent the men to Iraq knowing they were suspected of links to abuses.

It cited the already documented case of Lane McCotter, the former director of the Utah state department of corrections, who resigned after the death of a schizophrenic inmate who was held in a restraining chair for 16 hours.

Mr McCotter was sent to Iraq to organise its prison system after the US-led war launched in March 2003 and supervised last year the opening of the notorious Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad, the site of numerous abuses against Iraqis.

The station gave no evidence he was involved in the humiliation of Abu Ghraib inmates, over which seven guards have been charged and many others face legal action, but said he contributed to a climate that would favour abuses.

The program said General Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of prisons in Iraq, had told it that the living conditions at Abu Ghraib were untenable.

"But McCotter found them acceptable," she said in a German translation of her remarks, even if "they smelled of urine, trash and muck."

It said that another former official for prisons in Connecticut, John Armstrong, had lost his job a month before the war following the death of an inmate in the US.

He later became a senior prisons official in Iraq, it said. (AFP)

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