Welcome back, McCotter.(Lane McCotter)

Defying repeated orders from his guards, the inmate--a mentally ill 29-year-old man--refused to remove the pillowcase he'd placed on his head. As punishment he was strapped, naked, to a metal restraining chair for 16 hours. Scores of other prisoners had previously received similar treatment, some of them left sitting in their own waste. Shortly after being released from the chair, the prisoner collapsed and died from heart failure resulting from a blood clot that developed during his confinement.

Prison officials hastily devised a cover story, claiming that the inmate died as a result of beating his head against the wall. But the events leading up to prisoner's death had been recorded on videotape. Legal action by the inmate's family forced out the facts, resulting in a national scandal and the resignation of the official in charge of the prison.

Did this occur at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, circa 2003? No--it took place at Utah's Point of the Mountain State Penitentiary in 1997. Lane McCotter, cashiered from his post as head of the state Department of Corrections because of the scandal, was hired to head Management & Training Corporation (MTC), a Utah-based "private" (actually, corporatist) corrections company. Under McCotter's personal supervision, MTC operated a Santa Fe. New Mexico, county jail that was excoriated in a March 2003 Justice Department report for systematic abuses and inhumane conditions.

The Justice Department implemented a three-stage plan to address the Santa Fe situation. First, it threatened to sue the jail--and, by extension, MTC--unless conditions quickly improved. Second, it relocated 100 federal prisoners who had been incarcerated in the notorious facility. Third, it hired McCotter to help oversee the reconstruction of Iraq's prison system and to train Iraqi prison guards.

McCotter told the Salt Lake Tribune that his name was on two lists of qualified candidates, one composed by the Justice De partment's Federal Bureau of Prisons and the other by the National Institute of Corrections. Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo told the Tribune that McCotter "came highly recommended," but pointedly declined to say who issued that radiant endorsement.

McCotter worked with Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib's disgraced former commandant, and even escorted Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on a tour of the prison. There's no evidence that he played a role in any of the hideous crimes subsequently committed there (which may include, according to plausible ...