General Janis Karpinski welcomes the truth about Abu Ghraib
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She said she was a scapegoat. She said she was just following orders. She said she was demoted unfairly.
Now, retired Army Col. Janis Karpinski can say: I told you so.
Karpinski was one of two officers punished over the aggressive interrogations at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Pictures of detainees caused outrage around the world when they were leaked to the news media in May 2004. The photos showed naked prisoners stacked on top of each other or being threatened by dogs or hooded and wired up as if for electrocution.
Throughout the ordeal, Karpinski maintained that she and her troops were following interrogation guidelines approved by top brass. Today, Karpinski has found validation in a few Bush-era memos released last week by the Obama administration.
“The outrage was over the photographs, because the photographs were living color of what those top-secret memorandums authorized,” Karpinski said in an interview Wednesday. “So, it is unfair … the soldiers may have moved through [the military justice] system, but they never had a fair court-martial. Not any one of them, because they were condemned as one of the ‘bad apples…’ “
The memo, by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and then-Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury, allowed the use of such tactics as keeping a detainee naked and in some cases in a diaper, and putting detainees on a liquid diet. One memo said aggressive techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and slapping did not violate laws against torture absent the intent to cause severe pain…
The guidance was delivered to Abu Ghraib by then-Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was summoned to Baghdad from Guantanamo to evaluate the prison system.
Accusations were never allowed to proceed above members of the military. The sacrosanct Bush Administration publicly washed their hands. Lying through their teeth.
As General Karpinski said on television, this evening, “You could draw a straight line from Donald Rumsfeld – through General Miller – to Abu Ghraib.”
Too bad the mainstream press was busy tidying up after the lack of oversight from Congress. Stopped asking questions after a few hearings, baseline trials – don’t offend the guys in power.
