(2004-05-12) Karpinski Blames Miller Abu Ghraib

The US general who was in charge of running prisons in Iraq (War On Iraq) told Army investigators earlier this year that she had resisted decisions by superior officers to hand over control of the prisons to military intelligence officials and to authorize the use of lethal force as a first step in keeping order - command decisions that have come in for heavy criticism in the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, head of the 800th Military Police Brigade, spoke of her resistance to the decisions in a detailed account of her tenure furnished to Army investigators. It places two of the highest-ranking Army officers now in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, at the heart of decision-making on both matters.

Mark Mazzetti notes out of 38,000 military police soldiers, fewer than 1,000 have undergone specialized training for work at correctional facilities.

ClaudiaWallis connects the scandal to the Stanford Prison Experiment.

• Jan'2005 update: Philip Zimbardo, who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment, agrees - Kids who were pacifists were acting sadistically, taking pleasure in inflicting cruel, Evil punishment on prisoners... But the study was popular even before then because in a way it's a forerunner of Reality Tv... First, in both cases there's the deindividuation, the sense of anonymity... There was little or no supervision of them on the night and there was literally no accountability. This went on for months in which the abuses escalated over time... And then there is the hidden factor of boredom... I was recently engaged as an expert witness for the defense of one of the Abu Ghraib night shift guards in his court martial trial.