— Prison abuse "routine" in US
Similar abuse and humiliation to what suffered by Iraqi prisoners happens regularly in US civilian prisons across the country, raising little concern and even less an international outcry. There may actually be a connection between the two:
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.
The problems may well be caused by some of the same factors.
In a related development, embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered his "deepest apology" to the Iraqis abused by US soldiers, and also warned congress that even worse photos and video footage of prison brutality is yet to be made public.
PS: I wrongly assumed nobody, perhaps except lawyers paid to do dirty work, would actually defend the prisoner abuse in Iraq. Enter Rush Limbaugh. All right, he is a big fat idiot.
4:32:10 PM 
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We don't hear much about the small contingents in Iraq, so it's fascinating to read about the 
