Interesting comments by former Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski about the contractors working at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when incidents of were occuring in fall 2003. She was technically in charge at that time and after being reprimanded, she was demoted to Colonel for her failure to properly supervise the prison guards. Karpinski is the highest ranking officer to be sanctioned for the mistreatment of prisoners.
The interview is by Marjorie Cohn for Truthout.org.
— I just find it incredible that the system – the Pentagon and the Judicial System – can continue to keep those soldiers in jail when there are simply volumes of documents and information that is emerging, and continues to emerge, that says exactly what one, in particular, Graner, was saying all along: that he was ordered to do these things by the Military Intelligence people and the interrogators, the contract interrogators. And there’s more and more information to support that.
— It’s just incredible that these three contractors that they brought over were hired by the Justice Department in Washington, and it was the same Justice Department – there aren’t two separate entities – it was the same Justice Department that, between 30 and 60 days before hiring these people to come to Baghdad, the same Justice Department had fired them from their positions in the Utah Corrections Facility for prisoner abuse.
— When the war was declared over on the aircraft carrier, then sustainment operations – engineers, civilian contractors, military police, military police organizations – all those organizations kind of kick into high gear to get things moving down the same road. Well there was no sustainment plan. And I can tell you, Marjorie, my opinion is that there was no sustainment plan because, by that time, there were a lot of contractors – US contractors exclusively – who realized they could make a lot of money in Iraq.
— My soldiers were saying, I heard this often: “Ma’am, I want to get out of the Army and come back over here. I could be making five times the money that I’m making as a soldier. And these guys never go out and do anything. We’re doing all the work, and they’re drawing all the pay!” I heard it a dozen times a week from every level of soldier, every rank, in every one of my units. They could see it. They knew what was going on. Here’s these three contractors who are supposed to restore the prison system with the help of the military, and they never – I don’t want to say never – they hardly leave the confines of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
— And those civilian contractors who were imported were not subjected to the same Uniform Code of Military Justice discipline as the soldiers. They were cleared, removed from the face of the earth, and seven soldiers are being held responsible. It was grossly unfair.
— All of these reports now would indicate that these techniques were designed and tested and implemented down at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan. And when you take those same techniques and put them in the hands of irresponsible and non-accountable people, like these civilian contractors were, you are combining lethal ingredients. And what happens? You get civilian contractors who have a playground, and they get out of control. And unfortunately, at Abu Ghraib they suck the military into that same playground. There’s no doubt in my mind that they ordered these things to be done.
— They being the civilian contractors – Titan, CACI. The majority of those contractors were either in Guantánamo Bay or Afghanistan prior to being sent to Abu Ghraib. There were a lot of translators who were working for Titan. Some of them were locally hired, some of them were brought in from the United States. And they were given an opportunity to upgrade their positions to be interrogators – without any kind of formal training whatsoever. So now you have a deadly mix. You have people who have been exposed and who have used these techniques first-hand in other locations. They know that there is no supervision or control. They have been directed, using whatever words, to get Saddam, get the information and get these prisoners to start talking, use more aggressive techniques. So you have allowed people who have no responsibility whatsoever to use techniques that were originally, perhaps originally designed and used by very experienced hands. And it got out of control. It clearly got out of control.
— In my little corner of the world and my exposure down at the Coalition Provisional Authority, I saw corruption like I’ve never seen before – millions of dollars just being pocketed by contractors. Everything was on a cash basis at the time. You take a request down – literally, you take a request to the Finance Office. If the Pay Officer recognized your face and you were asking for $450,000 to pay a contractor for work, they would pay you in cash: $450,000. Out of control.
— There were contractors who were coming in there, hired. It’s an excellent question, how the soldiers felt about these contractors. The security guys, the bodyguards, and the security firms that were hired to provide security for visiting dignitaries or Congressional delegations – they were all making a minimum of $300 a day. $300 a day. And never left the Green Zone. They escorted the convoys to the front gate, and then the Military Police or the military units would pick up the responsibility from the gate of the Green Zone out. And here you have soldiers who are now responsible for the lives of these delegations, and some of them are making $3,000 a month.
