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
What is very troubling to me today are reports from soldiers serving at Abu Ghraib who have very strong suspicions that the abuse continues.
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.
Military police know what to do, they know the Geneva Conventions, and their objective is to provide a safe, secure, fair environment for prisoners under their control.
The vast majority of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, even after interrogation, had no further intel value whatsoever.
They can do whatever they want. They can make it appear anything they want, ... I will not be silenced. I will continue to ask how they can continue to blame seven rogue soldiers on the night shift when there is a preponderance of information - hard information - from a variety of sources that says otherwise.
It's hard to be happy when you are facing 120 to 140 degree temperatures and nothing seems to be moving in a direction that you think or they think or you've been told it's supposed to be moving in.
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.
That policy was abandoned very quickly, and the military police were tagged with the responsibility of conducting training, which they did. We were not equipped or set up with personnel to recruit new Iraqi guards.
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,
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.
If you hold thousands of prisoners, you have to feed them, clothe them, care for them, provide medical attention - and there were no provisions.
In November, they transferred control of Abu Ghraib to the military intelligence command completely; it was, after all, the center for interrogations for Iraq.
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.