43 Quotes by Janis Karpinski

was told by Colonel Warren, the JAG officer for General Sanchez, that they weren't assigned to me, that they were not under my control, and I really had no right to see them.

I knew how many MPs I had assigned to the brigade, how many military prison operations I would be running, but we needed to evaluate how many criminal prison operations we could support.

If you are charged with this responsibility of enhancing interrogations, or using soldiers to enhance interrogations to find Saddam, and you're above the law for all practical purposes, you might try some unusual techniques. Now we know that, in fact, they did.

At that time, about July 5, we had no Iraqi corrections officers working for us. It was a responsibility of the CPA, with contractors, to set up a training program.

I had 16 other prisons that I needed to pay attention to, and we did. And I had 3,400 soldiers who were depending on me to take care of them, and I did.

I thought that that mission and the mission of taking care of those soldiers were my priorities, and I stand by the same today. There wasn't a lot of support for those soldiers.

There was a military police brigade with over 3,400 soldiers getting ready to go home because their mission - prisoner-of-war operations - was finished.

They transfer the prison, and all of a sudden all this money cuts loose, all these people cut loose.

Shortly after we arrived in Baghdad, we had another conversation with the ambassador. He said that he wanted us to give him the timeline, because we had 90 days to get these prisons operational and transfer responsibility back to the Iraqis.