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The top U.S. military intelligence officer in Iraq visited Abu Ghraib prison repeatedly in November, when some of the worst abuses occurred, according to another senior officer.
Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast "was out at Abu Ghraib more than I was because the interrogation (of prisoners) was her lane," Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski told the St. Petersburg Times on Tuesday.
"I was out there three times in November, and she was out there every one of those times and made reference to being there yesterday or planning to be there tomorrow."
In a rare newspaper interview, Karpinski said she did not know if Fast or another intelligence officer, Col. Thomas Pappas, were aware of the abuses. But "I know Pappas well enough to know he's a man of integrity and if he knew, he would have done something," said Karpinski.
However, she added, "I do know that he was under tremendous pressure to get more actionable intelligence from interrogation operations. It was obvious and he told me that."
Karpinski was in charge of Abu Ghraib and 15 other Iraqi prisons until she was suspended and reprimanded in January.
She has denied knowledge of the abuses but was sharply criticized in an Army report for poor leadership of the 800th Military Police Brigade and lax oversight of Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were brutalized and photographed in sexually humiliating poses.
But the report, by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, says Pappas was "directly or indirectly" responsible for at least some of the abuses. It also said military intelligence officers set the "physical and mental conditions" for getting information from prisoners that could help coalition troops fight a growing insurgency.
Still unanswered is the question of who had ultimate responsibility for Abu Ghraib. On Tuesday, Taguba told Congress that control had been turned over to military intelligence officials, while an undersecretary of defense said it remained with military police.
In a phone interview from New Jersey, where she grew up, Karpinski told the Times she was away from Baghdad on Nov. 19 when Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior military official in Iraq, transferred command of Abu Ghraib to Pappas, whose brigade came under Fast's oversight.
"Nobody told me they were going to do that - all of a sudden an (order) went out that the prison was now under control of a military intelligence brigade," Karpinski said.
"When I came back, the operations officer said, "You're not going to believe this.' I said, "He's got all those assets out there, if he wants to run the prison, more power to him.' I did not complain to anybody about taking over the prison. What I had concern about was that once again this was an action that affected me and my soldiers directly, and they hadn't seen fit to even include me. You have a courtesy of at least informing the commander when something is no longer under their control."
Karpinski said she "rarely spoke" to Fast, whom Karpinski described as being "joined at the hip" with Sanchez's joint task force.
"They were not tactical operators; they were more concerned with achieving stated goals for the staff," Karpinski said. "Her schedule was full because the emphasis was being placed on interrogation."
Karpinski visited the interrogation facility at Abu Ghraib, where she saw civilian contractors and military intelligence personnel in civilian clothes. Although Taguba's report said the dress code, or lack of it, contributed to confusion over who was in charge, Karpinski said the interrogators "seemed to be professional" and she did not notice any problems with the one interrogation she observed.
Karpinski said she did not want to speculate whether Fast or Pappas told military police to do anything improper to pry more information out of inmates.
"I think somebody in the military intelligence world - I don't even want to say military intelligence command anymore - may have been saying, "You have to get more actionable intelligence.' It may not have been either of them giving orders - I certainly didn't hear them say any of this - and I think the question will remain until those soldiers have an opportunity to testify."
Several low-ranking soldiers have been charged with mistreating inmates, and one, accused of taking some of the photographs, is slated for an open court-martial May 19 in Baghdad.
Karpinski said her main contact with Fast was when both served on a review board that decided which prisoners were not a security threat. Fast, head of the panel, "would very often say, "No, he's not really ready to be released yet, put him back in the box, get more information.'
"You do the math," Karpinski continued. "If you review 30 people for release, she may have released two and the other 28 went back in the population, so the numbers were accumulating at a rapid pace."
With new prisoners constantly pouring in, the numbers of detainees held by the U.S.-led coalition soared to nearly 10,000 by late November. That caused overcrowding at Abu Ghraib and other prisons that contributed to the abuses, Taguba's report suggests.
Although military police were already stretched thin, Karpinski said the workload increased.
"Everything out at the prison before Nov. 19 - was it perfect? Absolutely not. Were we doing everything we could to make it better? Absolutely. But it seemed like every time we were moving in the right direction, they would throw another impossible mission at us."
In one case, Karpinski said, her brigade was ordered to transport prisoners from Abu Ghraib more than 300 miles to Umm Qasr in southern Iraq.
"We didn't have transportation assets, we didn't have any way of doing it," she said. After efforts to arrange flights for the prisoners failed, "we moved some of our soldiers from other duties to drive" them to Umm Qasr.
Another time, she said, the brigade was told to transport large pieces of equipment, a job that should have been handled by Sanchez's joint task force. "It was just one thing after another," she said.
In the meantime, Karpinski said, the task force did little to alleviate the hardship conditions under which her soldiers worked at Abu Ghraib. Taguba's report noted that MPs often came under mortar attack and had no barbershop, PX or other amenities enjoyed by soldiers elsewhere, factors that could have contributed to stress and abuse.
"Nobody was paying any attention to us," Karpinski said. "In hindsight, I would say that I should have and could have been more aggressive in going after those kinds of things, but we had 16 facilities to run and I could not focus all my attention on Abu Ghraib."
Under congressional questioning Tuesday, Taguba said he found no evidence of similar abuses at other facilities that remained under Karpinski's command. Taguba also acknowledged he had not talked to anyone above Karpinski's rank during his investigation.
Karpinski, a reservist and business consultant in civilian life, had no experience running a prison system. However, she said she didn't think that would have been a drawback had the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, provided all the help it was supposed to.
"We were allegedly supported by prison experts from the CPA. They were funded for 83 (positions) and in December they had three," Karpinski said. Among those who went to Iraq was an executive of a Utah-based private prison company, one of whose jails was under Justice Department investigation for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No action was taken.
Efforts to obtain comments from the CPA and Pappas, the colonel who replaced Karpinski as commander of Abu Ghraib, were unsuccessful. Fast, who has been promoted to head the Army's main intelligence center in the United States, has previously said she will not comment because of the active investigation into the role of military intelligence in the scandal.
Since she burst into public prominence two weeks ago with release of the shocking photos of abuse, Karpinski, 51, has been called the "torture general" and worse. But she said most of the reaction she has received personally has been favorable.
"People who come out in hallways, like in the airport in Atlanta, are saying, "Don't give up the fight, you have to do this.' I went from my anonymous life to being who knows what."
- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com