By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, May 1 — An Army Reserve general whose soldiers were photographed as they abused Iraqi prisoners said Saturday that she knew nothing about the abuse until weeks after it occurred and that she was "sickened" by the pictures. She said the prison cellblock where the abuse occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged the abuse.
The suggestion by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski that the reservists acted at the behest of military intelligence officers appears largely supported in a still-classified Army report on prison conditions in Iraq that documented many of the worst abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, including the sexual humiliation of prisoners.
The New Yorker magazine said in its new edition that the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and C.I.A. agents to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."
According to the New Yorker article, the Army report offered accounts of rampant and gruesome abuse from October to December of 2003 that included the sexual assault of an Iraqi detainee with a chemical light stick or broomstick.
While reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers have come to light in the last several days, the report cited by The New Yorker indicates a far more wide-ranging and systematic pattern of cruelties than previously reported.
General Karpinski was formally admonished in January and "quietly suspended" from commanding the 800th Military Police Brigade, the New Yorker article reports. while under investigation.
In a phone interview from her home in South Carolina in which she offered her first public comments about the growing international furor over the abuse of the Iraq detainees, General Karpinski said the special high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib had been under the direct control of Army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command.
She said that while the reservists involved in the abuses were "bad people" who deserved punishment, she suspected that they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She said that C.I.A. employees often joined in the interrogations at the prison, although she said she did not know if they had unrestricted access to the cellblock.
According to the New Yorker article, by the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, one of the soldiers under investigation, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, an Army reservist who is a prison guard in civilian life, may have reinforced General Karpinski's contention in e-mails to family and friends while serving at the prison.
In a letter earlier this year, Sergeant Frederick wrote, "I questioned some of the things that I saw." He described "such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell." He added, "The answer I got was, `This is how military intelligence wants it done.' "
Prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks, witnesses told Army investigators, according to the report obtained by The New Yorker. Much of the abuse was sexual, with prisoners often kept naked and forced to perform simulated and real sex acts, witnesses testified. Mr. Hersh notes that such degradations, while deeply offensive in any culture, are particularly humiliating to Arabs because Islamic law and culture so strongly condemn nudity and homosexuality.
General Karpinski said she was speaking out because she believed that military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and other reservists and away from intelligence officers still at work in Iraq.
"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away." ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/international/middleeast/02ABUS.html?hp>
Carl
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