A month after having his name stripped from a downtown jail, ex–top cop Bernie Kerik may be going back into the prison business—in Jordan. The Kerik Group, which offers prison-management consulting, has been working for King Abdullah II in Jordan, and a source says he has expressed interest in helping develop or run a U.S. detention center there. President Bush, who nominated Kerik to run the Department of Homeland Security in 2004 before Kerik withdrew his name after a series of scandals, has outsourced the construction of detention centers abroad to private contractors, amid continuing pressure to shut down the prison in Guantánamo Bay. Having more detention centers closer to the “theaters in the region” makes logistical sense, Defense Department spokesman J. D. Gordon says, but he says there are no plans to open prisons in Jordan, though human-rights groups say that the CIA is already holding hundreds of suspected terrorists at Al-Jafr in Jordan’s southern desert. Kerik’s attorney Joe Tacopina declined to comment.

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