Posted on 08/14/2004 7:08:28 AM PDT by Former Military Chick
BRIGADIER-GENERAL JANIS KARPINSKI says she will never forget the day she first set foot in Abu Ghraib, the infamous Iraqi prison which housed torture chambers under Saddam Hussein.
“You could smell death. When I was taken to the hanging chamber, I said ‘I can’t stay here, I can hear the voices, I can hear the screams’. I could feel myself going pale. It was filthy: some of the ropes they used to hang these guys were still there.”
I am driving with Karpinski through Rahway, New Jersey, where she grew up. It is a serene middle-class town of wide streets lined with oak and maple trees and colourfully painted houses. “Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places,” reads the motto on her car’s number plate. We are, needless to say, a long way from the horrors of Abu Ghraib.
“I feel safe here,” says Karpinski, as she manoeuvres through a flock of Canadian geese by the lakeside. Nonetheless her military career has been ruined by the publication of photographs depicting abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, which was under her command for several months. Although she has maintained fiercely that she knew nothing about the abuse as she was not responsible for that section of the prison, Karpinski has been suspended from the Army.
“I’m hurt to my soul,” she says, protesting that the Army has made her a scapegoat. “They have injured the trust that I placed in them.”
In June 2003 Karpinski became the only female commander to serve in Iraq leading the Army Reserve’s 800th Military Police Brigade, a job she had applied for. It was an unusual appointment for a woman, particularly a reservist, but she had a distinguished military career, having served as a targeting officer in the first Gulf War where she received a Bronze Star. “I love to be in a leadership position. That’s what makes my heart beat fast. I know I have the skills to lead soldiers and to make them better than they thought they could be.”
She is clearly a woman of steely determination and from brief telephone conversations with her before our meeting, I had the impression of someone who conformed to the Army stereotype: clipped, slightly brusque, organised. But in person she is different. For a start she arrives a few minutes late: nothing wrong with that, but not the rigid punctuality usually demonstrated by the Army. When she appears in the hotel where she has suggested we meet, she looks totally unlike the pictures I have seen of her as a hard-faced, thin-lipped woman.
Although broad-shouldered and well-built, she has a very striking, fine-boned face with grey-blue eyes and blonde hair scraped back into a bun. She is 51 but looks several years younger. In repose her face is almost beautiful, yet when she is angry her finely plucked eyebrows furrow and the good looks vanish.
Karpinski wears a pale gold jacket and black ruched top, with beige trousers and high-heeled white sandals. Her lips are painted coral and her toenails a matching shade. On her hands she wears several rings, including the sapphire engagement ring from her husband of 30 years, Lieutenant-Colonel George Karpinski, stationed in the Middle East for the past 20 years.
They see each other as little as once a year, but are in touch constantly by phone and internet, and he has been a great support to her. “His position is, as it has always been, ‘I support Janis. I know that she would never have tolerated any of this behaviour’.” Perhaps most extraordinary is her ability to talk. And talk. We have agreed to meet for one hour but eight hours later she is still talking in a firm, measured voice that rises when she is indignant — which she often is. She refuses any sustenance other than the occasional sip of water. Nor does she ever relax or lean back in the chair but sits forward, legs apart, arms on knees, at one moment describing in detail her meeting with Saddam Hussein, at another delivering a half-hour eulogy on the talents of her pet African grey parrot, Casey (“Einstein with feathers”). He says “hello ” when the phone rings, accompanies her everywhere (except Iraq) — and has even learnt to say “Delta is my airline”. Her car is full of small fluffy toys. A plastic duck with a US hat sits on the dashboard. Casey usually travels in the back.
I would guess she is lonely and, now that she has lost the crutch of the Army, feels somewhat abandoned. She lives alone in South Carolina and never had children. “If anybody wanted kids more than the other, George did. Not that I didn’t want them. It just wasn’t on the cards. And you have to be together occasionally.”
She spends a lot of time in Rahway, where she grew up with her five siblings. Later, as we drive through the town, she points out the hospital where she was born Janis Beam, the little grey house where she grew up and where her youngest brother lives now, the woods where she played, the lake she skated on in winter, the cinema where she saw the first Beatles movie and “screamed with everybody else”, the local Presbyterian church that the family attended every Sunday. Her father, a Second World War veteran, was a chemical engineer and her mother was active in the local Republican Party.
In South Carolina she has friendly neighbours but not many close friends. “I don’t have as many enduring friendships down there. My family is all here and I’ve thought about moving back one day. But South Carolina is my comfort zone: I have my computer there, my office there and I live very near the water.”
Her brothers and sisters describe a reckless, carefree girl. One day when she was about ten, her brother Jay says a neighbour saw her perched on the sill of her second-floor bedroom window, preparing to jump. “That kind of summed her up,” says Jay. “She was always the adventurous spirit.”
At school, she would readily take issue with the teachers: “I would always say if I felt something was wrong,” she says. “I was smart and clever and creative. Give me something difficult and I’ll figure it out.”
At 21, she married George. “He was a match made in heaven . . .”
George was not shocked by Janis Beam’s behaviour. “I think he was mostly attracted by my intelligence and the fact that I didn’t take anything lying down.”
Karpinski, who has worked as a teacher and a stress counsellor, applied to join the Army because she thought it would give her a chance to travel. “I felt a restlessness.”
When the recruiter came to talk to her, her husband — then a biology teacher — sat in on the meeting and decided to join up too. I ask her if the Army has satisfied her restlessness. “No, it’s made it worse.”
She welcomed the opportunity to go to Iraq but the moment she arrived, she sensed hostility from the male generals. “I was a female and they didn’t want me there. They looked on it as an insult to their organisation that they would have to rely on a reserve organisation to do this detention operation.”
Unlike the male generals, she had very basic living quarters and shared the communal showers. Shunned by the officers, she fraternised with the soldiers. “I had no colleagues, no one to go and sit with and bounce things off. I was always afraid, but made a specific point of managing my fear.”
Forty-eight hours before she took over the brigade, Karpinski was told that she would be responsible for all US military prisons and detention centres in Iraq — 17 facilities housing thousands of prisoners. “I had no idea. But I adapted.”
She spent much of her time travelling around Iraq, visiting the facilities and trying to make improvements despite chronic personnel and equipment shortages. In November 2003, Abu Ghraib was placed under the command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, but Karpinski’s soldiers continued to guard the detainees there. Cell blocks 1A and 1B, where the abuse took place, had been under military intelligence control since September. The photographs, it is generally agreed, were taken between October and December.
“There’s no blood on my hands for what those pictures depict,” says Karpinski, adding that the pictures “sicken” her. “I can’t stop what I’m not aware of . . . I was not allowed to remain overnight at Abu Ghraib because of the force protection requirements . . . The interrogation teams picked a time when they knew there was no chance of Janis Karpinski stumbling upon these activities. I don’t know what I could have done differently.”
Indeed she insists — although she has no proof — that responsibility for the interrogation techniques goes much further up the chain of command, even blaming the Secretary of State for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. This, as she is the first to say, is pure speculation. I ask her how certain she is that Rumsfeld supported such techniques. “One hundred per cent,” she states grimly. “If he did not design those techniques, he would give his approval because he had confidence in the people who were designing them.”
Including dog leashes and sexual abuse? She nods, then hesitates: “To the nth detail, maybe not.”
Although she does not feel that being a woman was a point in her favour among her fellow officers, she got on well with her own soldiers, and even the prisoners. “They were nice and polite; some would say ‘Wow’ — even Saddam.”
A few weeks after his capture, Saddam Hussein was placed in one of Karpinski’s prisons, where she visited him. “I wanted to go over and make sure nobody was taking his picture or posing with him. He was very charming and manipulative . . . I introduced myself and he said ‘Are you really an Army general?’ and I said ‘Yes’. He said ‘Sure?’ and I said ‘Yes, I’m sure, Mr Hussein’ . (Later) he said ‘One day in my country we will have (women generals) too.’ ” During a half-hour meeting with him she asked him if he was OK. “He looked around his room and said ‘To the extent I can be.’ I said: ‘Is there anything I can ask for? I can’t give you anything but I can certainly transfer the information.’ He said yes, he wanted some fruit, so I looked down at a bowl of apples and oranges on the floor and he said ‘No, no, not apples and oranges, I want apricots and bananas.’ He said he wanted to go outside every day for fresh air . . . and he said he wanted his reading glasses because he didn’t think the ones he had were his prescription . . . I told one of his interrogators and he said: ‘He’s right, we gave him a little bit different (prescription) because we want him to be a little bit uncomfortable and then start to co-operate with us.’ He had no marks, no bruises, no handcuffs, no complaints of any rough treatment . . . He seemed clear-headed. If he was angry I didn’t see it . . . The only time I saw a softening of his features was when I told him I understood he wanted to send a letter to his daughter.”
When she left, he shook her hand warmly. “He put his hands around my hand.”
A few days later she bumped into one of Hussein’s interrogators who told her that Saddam had said to him: “I don’t want to talk to you any more. Bring that lady general back over here.”
Soon after the photographs surfaced in January, Karpinski was quietly rotated out of duty. At the time her colleagues did not make her feel responsible. “When I left Iraq, General McKiernan (a commander based in Kuwait) said: ‘There’s a great future for Janis Karpinski in the Army reserves. Hold your head up high, that’s your characteristic.’ ” But in late April, a few hours after she arrived back at her home in South Carolina, the storm broke. “My sister called and said ‘Turn on the television, you’re on it.’ ” There were the photographs and there, too, was footage of herself. A general was saying: ‘This is Janis Karpinski the commander, and these are her soldiers’.
“They were trying to pin the blame on the disposable general . . . I expected the chief of the Army reserves to call me and say ‘You’re still one of my general officers. I just want you to know you have my full support.’ That never happened. To this day I never got a phone call from any one of them. It was like I was suffering from the bubonic plague and a phone call would transmit it.”
At first she found it hard to cope with the hordes of press camped outside her house and suffered sleepless nights. “It was an overwhelming barrage. You walk out your front door and 800 microphones are thrust at you.”
When it all got too much she would don a wig and spirit herself away. “I refuse to be depressed about it. I no longer have trouble sleeping at night and when I look in the mirror I don’t have a problem with the person looking back at me.”
“I feel safe here,” says Karpinski, as she manoeuvres (questionable spelling) through a flock of Canadian geese by the lakeside.
Frankly I don't feel the geese are safe around her.
I really am quite angry about this General. First I will need to do a search on her name and my screen name. Because I bet we would find previous articles on Karpinski and the source a London paper. I have not seen her written up in US papers as much as the overseas publications!
She is Lonely??? She is RESTLESS?? She is afraid???
Umm, who is on trial now? I have no sympathy for the folks I have seen in the photos, but what a commander sticking behind her troops ... and if they did wrong falling on the sword with them. I am so angry I really could say a bunch of bad words and well ... SPIT!
Please feel free to share your honest and colorful replies ... don't allow me to swim in the deep end with all my frustration.
Oh, boo hoo. Cry me a river, you nearly-war-losing incompetent bint. Take your stars and shove them. Bah.
Maybe some cheese to go with that whine, Karpinski?
I'm talking to Karpinski, FMC, not you.
Thank you for your service and God bless you.
They need to put her sorry-ass out of her (and our) misery!
Perhaps this seems harsh, but when you are in a leadership position, you lead. Otherwise you have no business with the job.
She auditioned for the billet, collected the paycheck, perhaps she should actually do the work.
Best regards,
Stars? That's singular. She'll never see two.
woman/manind = woman and mankind
Is this the same (probable homosexual) clinton appointee that refused to take responsibility for her command?
She can go crawl in to the slimy pits of hell and wallow in her own filth before I will care at all what she will spew from her vile mouth.
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way."
-- Thomas Paine
I usually add the word hell in there somewhere.
I rarely hear of women being described as "broad-shouldered", it is usually applied to men.
This is a direct quote from a general in the United States Armed Forces?
Thank you Patsy Schroeder!
Mark
I agree she should have been fired long ago. Instead she is strolling through parks feeding geese.
Her troops are on trial at Benning. Hmm who is worse off right now?
I do worry about the geese.
She has two stars. One for each earlobe.
You really can't blame Clinton for this one. She's National Guard.
Instead, she played prison commander and blames others for her own command failures.
Gunrunner2, thank you for your service. Your post is based on background with the military, your thoughts are respected in this household.
I'm pretty broad-shouldered myself. However, that usually gets lost when compared to the child-bearin' hips.
I can just imagine the Generals who walked into Auschwitz saying "Oh my , I just cant stand it , take me away, I can hear the screams, I can hear the voices I am feeling pale and faint".
This is a General? Give me a break.
Damned right as a General you see horrible things , If you aint got the stomach for it dont take the job. She was a PC appointee , plain and simple.Incompetent , yes, But it isnt all her fault the person who appointed her shares the blame along with all the Dykes from N.O.W. who pushed women into combat positions.
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