[Marxism] FW: Abuse Suit Focuses on a Guard Involved in Earlier Scandal--from NYTimes

["David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: David McDonald [mailto:dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 8:20 AM
To: snow- news
Subject: Abuse Suit Focuses on a Guard Involved in Earlier Scandal--from
NYTimes


Lower-downs are always sacrificed to protect higher-ups.

IMO, Rumsfeld will have to go but Bush is dragging it out as long as
possible to contain the damage and make it appear that sacrificing
Rumsfeld is really a gigantic loss and enough punishment for the
government. Wolfowitz cannot be confirmed as the new DOD chief.

It is well to remember here that one of the charged Abu Ghraid torturers
is a former prison guard.

David McDonald

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/nyregion/07guard.html?pagewanted=all&p
osition=

  Abuse Suit Focuses on a Guard Involved in Earlier Scandal
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: May 7, 2004


Seven years ago, Raymond L. Cotton was a central figure in a federal
prison scandal so big it had a cinematic name: Operation Badfellas. He
was one of 12 guards accused by the government of turning a federal jail
in Brooklyn into a Mafia social club where, in exchange for bribes, mob
inmates could dine on smuggled-in manicotti while plotting crimes with
their associates.

Unlike all the other guards arrested in the scandal, Mr. Cotton, then
president of his union local, never lost his job. (The bribery charges
against him were dropped after the government's chief witness was
accused in an unrelated drug case.)

Now once again, he is a central figure in a ballooning prison scandal at
the same place, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. But while
he was accused before of supplying Absolut vodka, pasta and garlic to
criminals, now he is accused in a lawsuit of denying food, phone calls
and medical care to abused Muslim detainees, and of physically
humiliating them in ways that resemble the treatment of Iraqi prisoners
by American soldiers facing court-martial.

(clip)



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