Abu Ghraib General Says She's Scapegoat
By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer
-- 6/15/04
LONDON - The American general who was in charge of Iraq Abu Ghraib prison
claimed she was being made a scapegoat for the abuse of detainees, and said
her successor once told her that prisoners should be treated "like
dogs."
In an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio broadcast Tuesday, Brig.
Gen. Janis Karpinski said Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller told her last autumn that
prisoners "are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point
that they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them."
Miller was in charge of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and now oversees
U.S. prisons in Iraq. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
Karpinski was suspended last month from command of the 800th Military Police
Brigade after she and other officers were faulted by Army investigators for
paying too little attention to the prison's day-to-day operations and not acting
strongly
enough to discipline soldiers for violating standard procedures.
Several soldiers are facing courts-martial over abuse allegations at the jail,
which flared when pictures of troops abusing and humiliating naked Iraqi detainees
were published in April.
In her defense, Karpinski has said that interrogations at the prison were
not under her command but were run by a military intelligence unit that was "under
increasing pressure to get more, as they call it, actionable intelligence."
Karpinski said that during a visit to Iraq in September, Miller — still
the commander at the Guantanamo Bay prison — spoke of wanting to "Gitmoize" Abu
Ghraib by applying the Cuban facility's regimented detention and interrogation
techniques.
"
He talked about Gitmoizing in terms of what the (military police) were going
to do; he was going to select the MPs, they were going to receive special training," she
said.
"
That training was going to come from the military intelligence command," Karpinski
added, noting that the troops under her command had no training in such interrogation
techniques.
Karpinski said she was being made "a convenient scapegoat" in the
abuse scandal.
"
The interrogation operation was directed; it was under a separate command and
there was no reason for me to go out to look at Abu Ghraib at cell block 1a or
1b or visit the interrogation facilities," she said.
Karpinski said was unaware until November that the International Committee
of the Red Cross had visited the jail and expressed concerns about detainees'
treatment
to U.S. officials. She said she did not see the abuse photos — believed
to have been taken late last year — until late January.
"
I didn't know in September, I didn't know in October, I didn't know ever" about
any abuse, she said.
" Those pictures which I saw on the 23rd of January were more shocking to me than probably the rest of the world ... I was absolutely sickened by those images and I couldn't even fathom a guess as to what happened to these people to make them go in such an opposite direction of how they were trained."