Former Iraq Prison Chief Rebels at ‘Scapegoat’ Role

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski turned 51 last week, but when she and her family celebrated in her native town of Rahway, N.J., they decided to stay home rather than venture out to a restaurant, not even a dimly lighted one.

The woman who commanded the Army Reserve’s 800th Military Police Brigade and supervised the guards at Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison has become one of the most recognizable and relentlessly pursued players in an erupting international scandal over prisoner abuse.

In part, that’s because Karpinski has not followed the route of the traditional commander who stoically accepts responsibility for failure on her watch and quietly retires. Instead, Karpinski has actively cooperated and sometimes sought out the media in a one-woman campaign to defend herself.

She is quoted regularly in major newspapers. She has made herself a ubiquitous figure on the talk show circuit -- from ABC’s “Good Morning America” to MSNBC’s “Hardball” -- refusing to be blamed for interrogation practices she insists she never would have allowed and human rights abuses that “sickened” her.

With just her own constantly ringing cellphone and no help from Army staff, she has waged a public-relations war a professional press agent might envy.

Not only has Karpinski chosen to defend her distinguished 27-year Army career publicly, she has unabashedly argued that the finger of blame should point at her superiors higher up the chain of command.

The door was opened to abuses, she says, when senior commanders in Iraq ordered Army intelligence officers to take control of the cellblocks that had been her responsibility at Abu Ghraib. Only then, Karpinski insists, were detainees smeared with feces, threatened with electrocution and forced into humiliating sexual acts.

The Pentagon has refused to comment on Karpinski’s allegations, citing pending investigations of the abuses. She has been suspended from duty but has not been charged with any offense, although the Army has not ruled out that possibility.

Karpinski’s outspokenness has set military traditionalists to gnashing their teeth.

Although Karpinski had an unusually successful career in the reserves before being put in charge of U.S. military prisons in Iraq, she spent much of her adult life as a civilian business consultant.

So she reacted more as a civilian than a soldier when her management of the prisons was criticized. Indeed, she called on her expertise in counseling corporate executives on responding to stressful situations -- not unlike the one in which she finds herself now.

Nor has she hesitated to point out that her long military career did not include experience managing prisons. The Army will not comment on what led to her assignment as supervisor of the sprawling system of prisons and detention camps while the investigation continues.

Col. Joseph Curtin, an Army spokesman, acknowledged that Karpinski has permission to talk to the media on the subject as long as she does not wear her uniform while doing so, purport to speak for the Army or disparage the service or its leaders. So far, he said, “she has stayed in her lane.”

Actually, Karpinski said, she first tried handling her crisis the Army way, by keeping quiet. She changed tactics, she said, only after concluding that no one was going to defend her and that she was being set up.

“You know how many people came to my rescue? None, not one,” Karpinski said in a telephone interview from her brother’s home in Rahway as a car waited to take her to another television studio.

Her statements have prompted questions on Capitol Hill, where the Senate Armed Services Committee is investigating conduct that has shamed the armed forces and damaged U.S. credibility in the Islamic world and elsewhere. Although it once appeared that she might be the highest-ranking officer implicated in the scandal, attention has lately migrated to more senior officials, including the civilian chiefs of the Pentagon.

In the process, Karpinski found that her life was becoming a media circus. So she put her civilian career on hold and devoted herself to managing her campaign.

She manages it with a surprisingly simple system. When she decided to go public, she gave her cellphone number to reporters. Now, wherever she goes, the cellphone collects questions, interview requests and messages from news organizations, sometimes a dozen or more an hour. Periodically, Karpinski reviews the messages, decides which ones to answer, then maps out her schedule.

In general, Karpinski carefully chooses her interviews and appearances, then works hard to avoid unwanted contact with the media. She moves frequently from place to place to escape the flocks of reporters and television trucks that materialize whenever her location becomes known. At her home in Hilton Head, S.C., her answering machine refers calls to her attorney. Her attorney’s answering machine informs callers he is out of the country.

She rarely spends more than a few days at a time at the house, where news trucks camp out on the oak tree-lined street and reporters knock relentlessly on her front door. The general takes refuge in Rahway, where she and her five siblings were born, relocating whenever reporters find her.

Karpinski also avoids staying long in public places. Her tight blond bun and striking blue eyes are recognized in grocery stores, airports, theaters and on the streets of New York. At the peak of the media frenzy, she donned a wig to walk from the house to her car to fool reporters who might be in range.

Although intent on telling her story and steadfast in her refusal to play the “scapegoat,” she has qualms about the downside of sudden celebrity. “I don’t want a public display of anger directed at me,” Karpinski said, staying with her youngest brother in the Cape Cod-style house where they all grew up. She has brought along her 25-year-old African gray parrot, Casey, for safekeeping.

“I certainly don’t want anybody to point a gun at me to take matters in their own hands. I have some concerns about my personal safety and the safety of my family,” she said.

Except for loyal siblings and her husband of nearly 30 years -- Army Lt. Col. George Karpinski, stationed with the U.S. Embassy in Oman -- Karpinski is in this alone. “As nobody is going to defend me, I am completely on my own,” she said.

When asked about her role in Iraq, where she was responsible for Abu Ghraib and all the other U.S. military prisons and detention centers, Karpinski said she tried to visit each facility at least once a month but went as often as once a week to Abu Ghraib, the huge compound that housed torture chambers under Saddam Hussein.

Inspections were difficult, she said, because the prison facilities were spread out over a country roughly the size of California and escalating attacks by insurgents impeded travel.

Eventually, according to Karpinski, Army intelligence officers asked that visits be kept to a minimum inside cellblocks where interrogations were conducted because they did not want the questioning disturbed.

After that, Karpinski said, she dropped by only occasionally, in accordance with their wishes. It was in those areas that most of the abuses occurred, she said.

Karpinski insisted that she warned her superiors that she lacked the troops and other resources to run the prisons properly, but she said her complaints were ignored.

She has said she resisted the decisions to give control of the prisons to military intelligence and authorize the use of lethal force to maintain order. She claims to have known nothing of the mistreatment being inflicted by her own soldiers, who were military police, not intelligence specialists.

In January, superiors formally admonished Karpinski for deficiencies in her command and she was rotated out of Iraq when her year of service was up. For weeks afterward, she honored the Army’s instructions not to discuss the pending investigation at Abu Ghraib.

Then in late April, the CBS show “60 Minutes II” aired the now-infamous snapshots of grinning American guards forcing naked prisoners to pose in humiliating positions. One photograph showed a hooded prisoner standing on a box, his hands attached to wires that he was told could electrocute him if he fell. The threat appeared to be a bluff.

The broadcast also aired a picture of Karpinski as commander of the prison system. “I was completely blindsided,” she said. “My sister called and said, ‘Do you have it on? You’re on it.’ Mine was the only name being mentioned, and it was connected to those photos.”

Her brother Jay Beam told her she had to say something in her own defense. She said she could not. “OK,” he said, “then I will.”

Her family began to speak out about the Janis Beam Karpinski they knew: The little girl who played with Barbie dolls and her brother’s GI Joes, once arranging her toys in a backyard tribute entitled “A-OK-U.S.-Army.” The future paratrooper who, at age 10, was caught by a neighbor contemplating a jump from her second-story bedroom window. The daughter of a World War II veteran who put the flag out on every holiday.

Soon, Karpinski became convinced that she was being “set up” to shoulder the blame for military intelligence officers whose determination to extract information from prisoners had spiraled out of control.

Learning that the Army had loosened its restrictions on discussing Abu Ghraib, Karpinski accepted an invitation from “Good Morning America” early last month and began to tell her story.

The approach has won her few admirers in military circles, where critics assert that her unorthodox behavior has broken a code among commanders.

“She is trying to blame everybody but herself. I’ve never seen a senior officer not accept responsibility for her command. That’s a first,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Randall L. Rigby.

“Soldiers follow orders. Generals anticipate what is wrong and fix it,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., adding that if Karpinski didn’t know about the abuse at Abu Ghraib, she should have. “We don’t sit back and wait for problems to come to us.”

And, he said, “it’s clear: If you are in charge and your unit fails, you accept responsibility and you march off.”

Although Karpinski’s actions run counter to military culture, she is also a civilian. In that world, a robust defense is hardly unusual.

“No one has the full story yet, so it’s not surprising Karpinski wants to get ahead of it,” said Harlan Ullman, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“She may feel that even though she is in the military, she is still a civilian, and a good offense is the best defense.”

Family members say she is holding up well, although they can see the strain. “She’s not curled up in a bunker,” said her brother Jay as the parrot squawked in another room. “She is carrying on.”

Karpinski has said often that she believes the whole truth will come out eventually. Until then, she moves from house to house, the mailbox at her Hilton Head home stuffed with uncollected letters, a FedEx package at the door.

The neighbors, staunch believers in her innocence, say they haven’t seen her in some time.

But recently, they noticed, someone put out an American flag.