Janis Karpinski
Janis Karpinski
Janis Leigh Karpinskiis a career officer in the US Army Reserve, now retired. She is notable for having commanded the forces that operated Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at the time of the scandal related to torture and prisoner abuse. She commanded three prisons in Iraq, and the forces that ran them. Her education includes a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and secondary education from Kean College, a Master of Arts degree in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSoldier
Date of Birth25 May 1953
CountryUnited States of America
At that time, about July 5, we had no Iraqi corrections officers working for us. It was a responsibility of the CPA, with contractors, to set up a training program.
I had 16 other prisons that I needed to pay attention to, and we did. And I had 3,400 soldiers who were depending on me to take care of them, and I did.
I thought that that mission and the mission of taking care of those soldiers were my priorities, and I stand by the same today. There wasn't a lot of support for those soldiers.
There was a military police brigade with over 3,400 soldiers getting ready to go home because their mission - prisoner-of-war operations - was finished.
They transfer the prison, and all of a sudden all this money cuts loose, all these people cut loose.
Thankfully we don't have any report but that might be as simple as soldiers being told what they can say to the media and what they can't say to the media,
Look how they've tormented me, what they've taken away from me,
living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn't want to leave.
I was ordered not to go out to Abu Ghraib after dark early on, because Abu Ghraib was extremely dangerous.
We need to fix this. It hasn't been done yet because there's still a reluctance to admit that there was even a problem - anywhere above seven rogue soldiers who got out of control on the night shift.
And shortly after that, when I try to get access to those soldiers, to ask them what in the world was going on, I was told that they did not work for me and I had no right to have access to any one of them.
The day after the prison was transferred to the military intelligence command, they had an entire battalion - 1,200, 1,500 soldiers - arrive at Abu Ghraib just for force protection alone.
The findings in the report have been largely discredited because he was not an impartial party and because so much more information has come out.