Backgrounder: Janis Karpinski

By Hala Shah

Janis Karpinski


Janis Karpinski.
Photo: Eric Risberg.


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Lecture: Janis Karpinski

U.S. Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski had been in command of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison for only four months, in 2003, when photographs of army reservists torturing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners surfaced in the media, sparking an international outcry. Suddenly, Karpinski found herself at the eye of a geopolitical storm.

In the wake of the scandal, the military launched a formal investigation and Karpinski and 16 fellow reservists were suspended from duty. A career military officer and the first woman to serve as a commanding general in combat, Karpinski was demoted to colonel, in May 2005, for dereliction of duty, misleading investigators, and shoplifting. (Army officials maintain that Karpinski stole a $22 bottle of perfume from a Florida Air Force base store 2002. Few details are available about the case. But Karpinski’s legal team says “there was nothing to substantiate” these allegations in the Army inspector general’s files, according to a May 12, 2005 Associated Press article.)

Karpinski accepts some culpability for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. “I am responsible for [my] soldiers,” she said in a Washington Post online forum on May 14, 2004, “[But] I cannot be responsible for other senior people who may have given them instructions specific to these incidents.” Karpinski says superiors in her chain of command concealed the torture and that she only learned of the abuse allegations after receiving an email from the commander of the Criminal Investigation Division.

Karpinski contends that the government used her as a scapegoat, unfairly focusing blame on her and the seven Army Reservists convicted in court martial following the scandal. “They wanted to dismiss this … [by] saying this was just seven bad apples that were out of control on the night shift. Well, I can tell you nothing is further from the truth,” Karpinski told The Albuquerque Journal on February 2006.

Testifying before the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, in January 2006, Karpinski accused Ricardo Sanchez, the lieutenant general responsible for heading up the Abu Ghraib investigation, of covering up evidence of prisoner abuse. She also claimed that Sanchez suppressed information linking American serviceman with the deaths of several female soldiers serving in Iraq.

In October 2005, Karpinski published a memoir, One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story. In it, she revisits the events at Abu Ghraib in an attempt to clear her name and defend her 25-years of service with the U.S. Army. “In many of the news reports, mine was the only high-ranking name mentioned. I was the fall guy,” she says, in her book. Despite the wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski believes the U.S. military is performing well overall. “Contrary to some media reports, we are doing the right thing here in Baghdad and throughout Iraq,” she told the Associated Press in December 2003.

Hala Shah is a senior at New York University’s Department of Journalism. She is the editor and president of Aftab, NYU’s Muslim student magazine. She is currently an intern at Beliefnet.com.

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