Ray Sansom's Blackwater Deal

In 2008, former Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom inserted an amendment that would privatize five state prisons. The contracts would go to Blackwater. The company is now known as Xe Services LLC. Blackwater best known for the controversial killing of 17 Iraqi civilians. Judge Ricardo M. Urbina dropped the charges against the accused Blackwater guards.

Florida Sen. Paula Dockery is opposed to the Blackwater contract. The town of Sneads's economy depends of the state jobs provided by the prison. Dockery issued a press release.

Senator Paula Dockery (R-Lakeland), is strongly opposed to the lengthy proviso language that was quietly inserted into the Senate’s proposed budget during last week’s Ways & Means Committee hearing. “The proposal to close unnamed existing correctional facilities resulting in the layoffs of over 1,000 state corrections officers to move inmates to private facilities is a policy decision that deserves to be vetted through a completely transparent process. As chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, I find it outrageous that major change in how we run our state correctional facilities was not reviewed by committees that were created for this explicit purpose,” said Senator Dockery. “Transparency cannot exist when there has been no opportunity for debate or testimony.”

A hush contract given to Blackwater. Maybe this is what Ray Sansom meant by saying he was a man of values. Those same values allowed Sansom to use the Republican Party of Florida credit card to buy expensive meals and tuxedo rentals. Sansom's strong values allowed him to never repay the RPoF for his lavish spending.

Alberto In Britain

It is so surprising Alberto Gonzales would be out of the United States right now. The Attorney General was in Britain defending the administration's human rights record.

The US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, today attempted to defend his government's controversial human rights record saying the Bush administration would not send individuals to countries where "it's more likely than not" that they will be tortured.

This is from the man that wrote, ""the war on terrorism is a new kind of war, a new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitation on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders some of its provisions quaint." Gonzales wrote the famous memo trying to invent a legal justification to torture detainees. The fact that Gonzales is a spokesman for America on this issue is a huge embarrassment.

Human Rights First that 45 detainees were homocides. Raw Story recently reported on a secret prison in Poland. Transport of detainees went over European air space.

MI6 officials say the two administrations then decided to fly high-value suspected terrorists to secret gulags in Eastern Europe. The CIA-operated flights would pass through the air space of a number of countries – among them Britain, Germany, Spain and Poland. European Union officials and human rights groups would later say these interrogations may have violated the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention against Torture, to which the United States and Poland are both signatories.

Contrast that with what Alberto Gonzales said.

Asked if the US would always seek the permission of a government before flying suspects through their air space on "rendition" flights to a third country, Mr Gonzales said: "The US government respects the sovereignty of every European country, including the UK.

That conflicts with past reports of countries not knowing their air space was used to transport detainees to secret prisons.

This is more serious than the U.S. Attorney firings. It shows Gonzales lacks the judgement and decency that most humans take for granted. He looks at torture as a career opportunity. People have looked at his background and can't find an issue he feels passionately about. For Gonzales this is less about the war on terrorism and all about gaining favor with Bush. (A pro-choice Bushie?) The Supreme Court is the prize. I doubt Gonzales will ever get there, but it explains his motivation.