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Demoted Brigadier Cleared of Some Charges
2006-03-16
Army documents released Thursday substantiate assertions by Janis Karpinski, the highest-ranking officer punished in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, that she was innocent of two principal allegations lodged against her by the officer who initially investigated the abuse matter. Among the documents was a January 2005 report by the Army Inspector General's office that found insufficient evidence to support allegations that Karpinski had made a misleading statement to other Army investigators and that she failed to obey an order in connection with disciplinary action against soldiers under her command. The Army had previously made public the fact that the inspector general had not upheld those two allegations, but the report elaborating on the circumstances and the findings was not released until Thursday. The inspector general did uphold one allegation: that Karpinski, in her role as commander of a military police brigade responsible for Abu Ghraib, was derelict in the performance of her duty to ensure adequate protection of her soldiers at the prison. In her formal response to the report, which she submitted on Sept. 19, 2004, and which was among the documents released by the Army Thursday, she wrote that there was no merit to the charge of dereliction of duty, stating that she had repeatedly asked for reinforcements and other assets but was denied by higher authorities. She wrote in her rebuttal that senior U.S. commanders in Iraq had "shirked their responsibility to provide support to my brigade, including but not limited to logistics, personnel replacement and force protection." The Army report also cited evidence that she failed to properly respond to an International Committee of the Red Cross report in 2003 that cited numerous deficiencies in the treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. Large sections of the inspector general's report on this topic were blacked out by censors before its release in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. That matter was not among the central charges against Karpinski, an Army Reserve brigadier general who was relieved of her command of the 800th Military Police Brigade, reprimanded and demoted to colonel last May. In a book published last summer, Karpinski wrote that she did not know about detainee abuse and asserted that higher-ups encouraged cruel treatment. She also has maintained that she was made a scapegoat as a woman and a reservist. The Army had publicly disclosed last year that the inspector general's review upheld the allegation of dereliction of duty as well as an unrelated charge of shoplifting. But the inspector general's report itself had not been released. It was among 9,000 pages of documentation the Army made public Thursday in response to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. All sections of the inspector general's report pertaining to the shoplifting charge were blacked out by censors. Karpinski also had been faulted by previous investigators for failing to provide an adequate accounting of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers. Those investigators said they found evidence of "ghost detainees" -- prisoners whose presence at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere in the U.S.-run detention system in Iraq were deliberately kept hidden from the Red Cross. In her September 2004 rebuttal to the Army Inspector General, Karpinski wrote that her brigade had not favored the moving of detainees to hide them from the Red Cross. "Only on one occasion did the brigade know of this happening and this was a result of a direct fragmentary order by Lt. Gen. Sanchez to do so," she wrote, referring to Ricardo Sanchez, who at the time was the top American commander in Iraq. "The brigade immediately objected to the implementation of the order and contacted the CJTF-7 staff judge advocate to question it," she added, referring to the top lawyer assigned to Sanchez's headquarters. "The brigade was told to implement the order."
Abramoff White House Visits to Be Released (2006-05-02)U.S. Demands Files From ISPs, Tech Firms (2006-03-30)Demoted Brigadier Cleared of Some Charges (2006-03-16)Agencies Missing FOIA Deadlines, AP Finds (2006-03-12)7 (11285)
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