Iraq

General repulsed by Iraq photos

Brig. Gen. Karpinski, who ran the prisons, tells the Times she had no idea Iraqi prisoners were being abused.

The brigadier general in charge of Iraq's prison system until February says she was "sickened" and shocked by photographs showing abuse of inmates in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.

"I did not have knowledge of the abuse and certainly would not have allowed it to continue if I was aware," Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski said in an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times this weekend from her South Carolina home.

"The news seems to indicate I was not only aware, but endorsed it."

However, she added, "I accept responsibility to the point where I could have made a difference."

Karpinski, a reservist, also said that "a senior leadership failure" reaching to the highest ranks of the active duty military had caused the prisoner situation "to get out of hand."

As Karpinski put it, the story "exploded" with a 60 Minutes II report Wednesday showing Iraqi prisoners in sexually humiliating positions, including lying naked in a pyramid formation. Other photos showed a female soldier giving a thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a naked Iraqi.

Karpinski assumed command of the 800th Military Police Brigade last June, making her the only female commander in Iraq. She was responsible for 15 prisons and detention facilities in southern and central Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, the vast prison on the outskirts of Baghdad that achieved notoriety as a torture chamber during Saddam Hussein's regime.

A business consultant in civilian life, Karpinski, 51, had a long career in the reserves as an intelligence and operations officer, but no experience in running a prison system.

"A lot of the time the question is, "How do you feel about being in command of the unit in possibly the most important mission in Iraq?"' she told the St. Petersburg Times for a story in December. "I say, "A lot of the time I feel tired."'

Karpinski indicated then that the biggest problems were caused by Iraqi guards who had begun working side by side with coalition troops. One Iraqi was fired and charged with raping a female inmate, while others took bribes or failed to show up for work, she said.

An article in the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine says an internal Army investigation found numerous instances "of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib between October and December.

"Pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair ... sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick ... and in one instance actually biting a detainee," were among the findings of a confidential report completed in February and obtained by the magazine.

Gen. Antonio Taguba, who conducted the investigation, said Abu Ghraib was overcrowded, the soldiers under Karpinski's command were "poorly prepared and untrained" and that Karpinski rarely visited the prisons.

Last fall, Karpinski told the St. Petersburg Times she tried to visit each prison at least once every three months but had been forced to scale back as attacks against the coalition increased.

In response to an e-mail Friday from the newspaper seeking comment about the abuse scandal, Karpinski said: "The Army has silenced me for the time being." But, she added by e-mail, she was awaiting permission to "speak and defend myself."

In a subsequent phone interview with the New York Times, Karpinski said military commanders were trying to pin the blame on her and other reservists.

"Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame?" she asked. "They want to put this on the MPs and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."

Karpinski stressed she was not defending those involved, whom she called "bad people," but said they were only a small fraction of the nearly 3,400 reservists, including an MP unit from St. Petersburg, who reported to her.

Karpinski also told the New York Times she was disturbed that little attention has been paid to a military unit that controlled Cellblock 1A, where reservists guarded the Iraqi detainees between interrogations.

Military intelligence officers were in and out of the tiny cellblock "24 hours a day," she said. "They were in there at 2 in the morning, they were at 4 in the afternoon. This was no 9-to-5 job."

In correspondence with family members, one of the soldiers accused of abuse said he and other reservists were "encouraged" by the intelligence team, which included CIA officers and private contractors hired to serve as "interrogation specialists." The Army's internal report found that members of the intelligence team were "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib," according to the New Yorker.

Six reservists, members of the 372nd Military Police Company of Cresaptown, Md., face a variety of charges, including dereliction of duty, cruelty, assault and indecent acts. A seventh was transferred back to the United States after becoming pregnant. The general who investigated the case did not suggest criminal proceedings against Karpinski, but recommended she be relieved of command and formally reprimanded, the New Yorker said.

However, in her e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times, Karpinski denied she had been "reassigned" and said she left Iraq with her reservists as part of the normal troop rotation.

President Bush has condemned the mistreatment, saying he shared "a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated."

With the images of U.S. soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners appearing in newspapers around the world, the scandal grew Saturday when London's Daily Mail published new photographs of a hooded Iraqi prisoner, who reportedly was beaten and urinated on by British soldiers.

The photographs have caused a furor throughout the Arabic world, which views homosexuality as a deadly sin. Many Arabs in neighboring countries accused the U.S.-led coalition of being "no better than Saddam Hussein," and predicted the scandal would rally support for Islamic fundamentalists.

The perpetrators must be punished "as war criminals," said Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report. Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

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