Janis Lost a Bird

Having lost a bird, demoted from Brig. General to Colonel, Janis Karpinski grumbles about the Bush administration. Claiming Abu Ghraib was not her fault, blames Rumsfeld, Bush, and superior officers. She also plays the sex card, claiming she was chosen to take the fall for Abu because she's female, a martyr for womanhood. (Forget about the shoplifting charge at the PX, no scapegoating for makeup and small items.)

Karpinski was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1977. She went to the Reserves in 1987, and became a "self-employed consultant" in Hilton Head, SC, where she ran grueling military style training programs for those hoping to scale the corporate ladder. I could find nothing on the "Executive Training and Corporate Improvement Program" listed on her wikipedia bio. I can't imagine Bill Gates or Donald Trump in their youth punishing themselves with these programs but maybe executives have become real warriors. I suspect the market for this grueling improvement is executive employees of "private military companies."

In September 2003 Karpinski was the Abu tour guide for Rumsfeld and other VIPs, showing them where Saddam once tortured, raped, murdered, committed atrocities. In December 2003 in a St. Petersburg Times interview she stated in Iraqi prisons "living conditions now are better in prison than at home, and that "at one point we were concerned they wouldn't want to leave." Sounds like she didn't spend much time at the Abu office water cooler picking up prison gossip.

So what happened? She now says Army Intel officers encouraged the abuse and the guilt runs all the way to the WH. She claims she was not allowed to speak with the Abu nightshift prison guards as they were not under her command (although 7 of the reservists caught on film humiliating prisoners were her thugs). She didn't live at the prison and traveling was not allowed at night because it was unsafe, so she didn't know what went on at night. She had no experience or training in prison guard duty some of her supporters reason.

She lived near Baghdad International Airport in what used to be Hussein's private sports preserve. "The setting is almost paradisiacal with small palaces surrounding a man-made lake." Nice. I'd like to know how many days she called in sick to Abu so she could enjoy those small palace surroundings.

Karpinski is a woman with 28 years in camo and khaki and running military style programs. Her husband is also military, Lt. Colonel George Karpinski. She served primarily in MI and MP assignments, and served in the first Gulf War. And she couldn't CYA (cover your ass) any better than this? Incompetence, lack of leadership, crass unconcern, and promoted on a gender ride from the women's movement had nothing to do with her failure at Abu Ghraib, right? It really does roll downhill, and most of it missed the Colonel. She should be in a cell a few floors below Lyndie England; instead she rotates out and goes home with a PR tour and military benefits.