Holding a dog leash attached to an Iraqi prisoner and smiling, Pfc. Lynndie England, along with nine other soldiers featured in photographs showing Iraqis undergoing humiliating torture practices, shocked the public in 2004 and became known as an embarrassing military scandal -- the scandal known as Abu Ghraib.
The incident opened the ground for questioning U.S. military actions in the Abu Ghraib prison, and colonel Janis Karpinski, commander of the soldiers in the photographs, vented her anger during a Rutgers Against the War panel last spring, in the Graduate Student Lounge on College Avenue.
Rutgers Against the War, the group sponsoring the panel on Abu Ghraib, has grown in membership to around 25 percent since last year, when the group held a University-wide "walkout" to protest the Iraq conflict. In that event, a large number of students on campus refused to go to class to protest the ongoing war, said Ian Chinich, a member of RAW and a University alumnus.
"We're much larger after the walkout, much stronger and much more influential on campus this year," he said.
R.A.W. was founded in spring 2005 to protest what Chinich calls "wars of imperialistic aggression." The Iraq conflict, he said, falls into this category.
During the panel last spring, Karpinski said the military decided to make her a scapegoat instead of punishing the higher-ups in the administration. Crowned a general during the Iraq conflict, she was bumped down to colonel after the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal.
Her soldiers may have been the ones to carry out orders during the Abu Ghraib incident, but she said higher ranking officials, such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, were the ones who enacted the torture conditions in Abu Ghraib and other prisons, including the physical and sexual humiliation practices depicted in the photographs.
"Rumsfield was the one that signed the bill," she said.
And prisons were ill-equipped to deal with the many prisoners it contained as well, said Karpinski - the prisons were overpopulated, there was not enough manpower and not enough provisions.
Whenever Karpinski complained to higher ranking officials, she found only silence. She said she was told to deal with the problems herself.
I don't know how many times I was told by people wearing more stars than me, 'Figure it out, Karpinski,'" she said during a 2004 Washington Post interview. She also said she visited Abu Ghraib less and less when the military decided to post an intelligence brigade in command of the prison, although some of her soldiers were still guarding prisoners there.
She was also in command of prisons elsewhere in Iraq, she said, and visited those prisons more often after the brigade took over Abu Ghraib. Unfortunately, the photograph scandal occurred during this time, between October and December, when she was no longer continuously watching the prison.
When questioned about whether the forced in Iraq were becoming as ineffective as forces in Vietnam decades ago, Karpinski responded in the affirmative.
"We're wiping out our future. It would be 10 years to rebuild the military to what it was in 2001. It hasn't been until recently people in the military are speaking out," she said.
Keith Krebs, a 60-year-old U.S. air force veteran who experienced Vietnam firsthand, also agreed with Karpinski's statements.
"I have seen some bad times in this country," he said, "but those guys never came close to what this administration has done to the country. We are probably facing the most dire distress this country has ever seen. I thought Nixon was the worst it could get."
An Iraq veteran, Jim, who would not give his last name, also said the conditions of Abu Ghraib were similar to other U.S. prisons he's seen in his experience in Iraq.
"The most well-intentioned people will break down under these conditions," he said.
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