US Gen says her troops were ‘encouraged’ to abuse Iraqis

In her first public comments about the brutality—which drew wide attention and condemnation after photographs documenting it were broadcast on Wednesday night by CBS News—Karpinski said that while the reservists involved were ‘‘bad people’’ and deserved punishment, she suspected they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation.

Speaking in a telephone interview from her home in South Carolina, the general said military commanders in Iraq were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and the reservists.

‘‘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 MPs and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it’s not going to go away.’’

She said the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen in the large prison and was essentially off-limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations.

She said repeatedly in the interview that she was not defending the actions of the reservists who took part in the brutality, who were part of her command.

She said that when she was first presented with the photographs of the abuse in January, they ‘‘sickened me’’.

‘‘I put my head down because I really thought I was going to throw up,’’ she said. ‘‘It was awful. My immediate reaction was: These are bad people, because their faces revealed how much pleasure they felt at this.’’

But she said the context of the brutality had been lost, including the fact that the military police officers involved represented only a small fraction of the nearly 3,400 reservists who reported to her from 16 different prisons and similar locations around Iraq.

She said she was also alarmed that little attention has been paid to the military unit that controlled Cellblock 1A, where her soldiers guarded the Iraqi detainees between interrogations.

She said that the floor space of the two-story cellblock was only about 40 feet by 20 feet, and that military intelligence officers were in and out of the cellblock ‘‘24 hours a day’’.

‘‘They were in there at 2 in the morning, they were at 4 in the afternoon,’’ said Karpinski, who arrived in Iraq last June and who was the only woman to hold a command in the war zone. ‘‘This was no 9-to-5 job.’’

The photographs of American soldiers smiling, laughing and signaling ‘‘thumbs up’’ as Iraqi detainees were forced into sexually humiliating positions provoked outrage just as the American military was seeking to pacify a rising insurgency and gain the

trust of more Iraqis before turning over sovereignty to a new government on June 30.

Karpinski, who has returned to South Carolina and her civilian profession as a business consultant, said she visited Abu Ghraib as often as twice a week last fall and had repeatedly instructed military police officers under her command to treat prisoners humanely and in accord with international human rights agreements.

‘‘I can speak some Arabic,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m not fluent, but when I went to any of my prison facilities, I would make it a point to try to talk to the detainees.’’

But she said she did not visit Cellblock 1A, in keeping with the wishes of military intelligence officers who, she said, worried that unnecessary visits might interfere with their interrogations of Iraqis.

She acknowledged that she ‘‘probably should have been more aggressive’’ about visiting the interrogation cellblock.

She stressed that she had received no reports from any of her commanders of possible prisoner abuses in the cellblock.

— The New York Times