Lecture: Janis Karpinski
RELATED:
Former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, one-time commander of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, was demoted to colonel in May 2005, following the prisoner abuse scandal. Trading in her fatigues for a business suit, Karpinski ended a 28-year career with the U.S. Army and Army Reserve in 2005, and embarked on a national speaking tour.
In her memoir of her wartime experiences, One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story (2005), Karpinski details the events leading up to the 2004 scandal that sparked an international outcry.
On March 3, 2006, Karpinski spoke at NYU’s Department of Journalism as part of an ongoing campaign to reveal what she believes to be the truth behind events at Abu Ghraib. Throughout her talk, she confronted lingering questions about the culpability of her Army Reserve soldiers in the acts of torture for which the prison became notorious. At the center of the scandal is the prevailing misconception that “seven bad apples out of control on the night shift” were responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski said, referring to the army reservists convicted as a result of the scandal. But high-ranking Bush administration officials, like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had sanctioned the practice of photographing prisoners in sexually explicit poses, according to Karpinski.
The torture techniques in question were first approved in a 2002 memorandum written by Alberto Gonzalez, then Chief Legal Consul to President Bush, she said. The memorandum marked a departure from the Geneva Convention, which emphatically forbids torture. These interrogation methods had been tested at Guantanamo Bay Prison and Bagram Prison in Afghanistan, said Karpinski. To back up her claim, she cited a series of memorandums recently released by Alberto J. Mora, the outgoing general counsel of the United States Navy, and the American Civil Liberties Union’s website, which showcases thousands of pages of testimony from government employees and contractors, claiming to have witnessed the use of similar torture techniques at prison facilities in Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Prison.
Gonzalez designed the techniques to save time, said Karpinski. With 8,000 security detainees to question at Abu Ghraib, soldiers were eager to bypass the slow process of breaking down prisoners’ defenses. For efficiency’s sake, “they would take pictures of prisoners in humiliating positions, flash that up on a computer screen at the beginning of the next interrogation and say, ‘start talking or tomorrow you’re on the bottom of the pile,’” she said.
In January 2004, when Karpinski first learned of the torture and abuse, she says she found herself at the bottom of pile-unfairly blamed by the administration for the actions of several of her superiors. She claims she was the last to know about the controversial techniques being used on prisoners. According to Karpinksi, her superiors failed to notify her about the abuses being committed at Abu Ghraib. She learned of them only after receiving an e-mail from Colonel Marcelo, the commander of the Army Reserve’s Criminal Investigation Division.
Abu Ghraib was occupied by the 800th Military Police brigade, under Karpinski’s command, and by the Military Intelligence brigade. Defining who was in charge of what was often problematic, she said. “Somehow, in all of this, the Pentagon, or the Secretary of Defense, or this administration, dismissed the chain of command between me, as the commander of the [800th], and those soldiers who were on the ground in cell block 1A,” she said. Her superiors’ failure to tell her about the interrogation techniques being employed at the prison was more than just a kink in the chain of command, contends Karpinski. “I believe they kept it from me because they knew I would have sounded the alarm,” she said. “It would not have occurred on my watch with my endorsement.”
The Army Reserve maintains that Karpinski’s removal from Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with the scandal, but Karpinski insists she was scapegoated. “When things went wrong at Abu Ghraib prison, nobody stood out as a more convenient target than the female general, who looked so out of place from the perspective of all those male warriors,” she writes in her memoir. Karpinski’s claims have buttressed by the information outlined in several military documents recently released by the office of the Army Inspector General. The Army Inspector General’s office said it “found insufficient evidence to support allegations that Karpinski had made a misleading statement to other Army investigators, and that she failed to obey an order in connection with disciplinary action against soldiers under her command,” according to an AP article published on March 17, 2006.
Now retired and free to speak out about the scandal, Karpinski is devoting herself to publicizing her version of events. Through her memoir and numerous speaking engagements, she is waging war against what she views as the widespread cover-ups and misconceptions regarding the Abu Ghraib scandal. Even if the public believes only half of the information out there, Karpinski said, it’s clear that an incompetent brigade commander and seven unethical soldiers can’t be held entirely to blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, although this is the version of events the Bush Administration has actively promoted.
While the seven soldiers aren’t entirely blameless, Karpinski said, the government and military dealt them an unfair hand. “I don’t want to reduce it to saying they were simply following instruction or orders,” she said. “But I can tell you with complete confidence that these soldiers did not design these techniques, they did not develop these techniques, and they did not do this in a vacuum.” Karpinski is convinced that the civilian contractors these soldiers were taking orders from lead them to believe that their methods were not only legal but necessary weapons in the global war on terrorism. “One of their mistakes was not saying no,” said Karpinski.
Karpinski is also committed to uncovering the details behind the deaths of several female soldiers serving in Iraq, information that she claims Lieutenant General Sanchez, one of her superiors at Abu Ghraib, suppressed because of allegations that male soldiers were guilty of sexual misconduct, including rape. In January 2006, she testified before the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, revealing everything she knew about Abu Ghraib and everything she knew about the deaths.
“I believe that [the Bush administration] knew about the [abuse at Abu Ghraib] long before there was any mention made to me,” she said. “Those [seven soldiers] need a lot of company in their jail cells. People have walked away blameless from this, all the way up to and including the Secretary of Defense.”
“All you have to do is scratch the surface a little bit and you’ll find the truth,” said Karpinski.