Sheriff under fire for Al Jazeera access to jail

The chairman of the Harris County Republican Party sharply criticized Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia Thursday for granting jail access to a reporter and videographer from Al Jazeera English, an English-language offshoot of the Arabic news network. GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill invited supporters to call the sheriff's office and "voice concerns" about the decision to allow Al Jazeera English reporter Josh Rushing, a former public affairs officer for the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq, to conduct interviews for a long-form news story about treatment of the mentally ill by U.S. law enforcement. Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt also gave an interview to the network Thursday, a police department spokesman confirmed. "We think it's odd, at best, to have Al Jazeera going through our jails and actually interviewing folks," Woodfill said. "Second, we don't believe our chief law enforcement officer should be promoting an organization that has been linked to Al Qaeda and other terrorist or quasi-terrorist organizations. So we thought it was important to let our folks know what was going on." Alan Bernstein, a spokesman for Garcia, said the sheriff's office "fully vetted" the news crew's request and found them to be legitimate, since the Al Jazeera network has been granted interviews by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and that Rushing has regularly been granted access to the Pentagon for news stories.