Contractor Indicted for Prison Abuse

New York Times:

A contractor working for the Central Intelligence Agency has been charged in the beating death of a prisoner who was being interrogated in Afghanistan, Attorney General John Ashcroft said today.

I must admit I wonder about the wisdom of using contractors for interrogations. Not because I think that contractors will be necessarily more likely to abuse prisoners than soldiers or other direct employees of the government but it is difficult to understand why there are contractors for this sort of thing in the first place. While I am big on the free market and private companies doing a lot of things that the government does now, interrogations are not one of those things. When not working for the government is there someone else this guy worked for? I hope not. Government has a monopoly on the use of force and the dispensing of justice and interrogations are a part of that monopoly. This is not a place for the private sector.