BushCommission.org has posted some of the audio from last weekend’s session, including that of Brig. Gen. Colonel (Ret.) Janis Karpinski, who testified during examination by Marjorie Cohn, President-Elect, National Lawyers Guild, that orders to torture and abuse prisoners in U.S. facilities in Iraq came from above and she was purposefully kept in the dark. Providing a specific timeline and keys to evidence of her compartmentalisation, Karpinski cited the sworn testimony of a legal advisor to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez related to “the meetings held to discuss the progress of interrogations or better techniques to use for certain detainees.” When asked by General Fay if General Karpinski attended any of these meetings, he said, “No sir, she did not. She never attended any of the meetings. In fact, we scheduled them specifically so she would not be able to attend any of the meetings.”
Whether the Wall Street Journal was correct that Karpinski discussed the Red Cross report on prisoner abuse with others and signed the official response in late November 2003 (Col. Marc Warren testified before the Senate the response is dated 24 December | “Karpinski signed the response, dated 24 December 2003.” Fay Report (pdf), p.100), or as she testifies, was ambushed with it in the first week of December by Col. Marc Warren, JAG officer to Lt. Gen. Sanchez (an office she says kept the October report from her deliberately), when Karpinski boasted to the St. Petersburg Times on 14 December 2003 that prison conditions under her command were so good, “we were concerned they wouldn’t want to leave,” she thought it was true. Only after receiving a classified e-mail from the Commander of the Criminal Investigation Division on 12 January 2004 that abuse charges were credible, severe, and the subject of an ongoing investigation did she begin to put the pieces together of a very different story that “her boss” Sanchez failed to disclose. According to Karpinski, the e-mail was the first time she’d been informed of an ongoing investigation. The first time she saw these photos was on 23 January. That same month Sanchez formally suspended her from all duties.
Karpinski believes she is a victim of the Bush administration’s PR campaign to package and sell torture and abuse as the acts of a “few bad apples.”
When they rolled it out it was met with some of the more bizarre and incomprehensible reasoning of those in the circle-jerk, front-line defence of the War on Terror being a freedom operation, who dared to argue that the U.S. is freeing women in the Middle East from societal shackles and chains while at the same time calling for American women to be put into them.
The “right” blamed the feminist movement of the 1980s and affirmative action for the “incompetent” Karpinski’s rise to power and denied she’d been scapegoated. More than a few cited Karpinski and others like Lynndie England in calls for the removal of all women from the military, a bandwagon the popular Air Force veteran and miliblogger baldilocks seems to have missed even as it paraded down blogstreet with bells and whistles blaring. If she weighed in I can’t find it.
The quotable Barbara Ehrenreich said, “A uterus is no substitute for a conscience,” and pointed out that “the U.S. official ultimately responsible for managing the occupation of Iraq since October was Condoleezza Rice.”
Yet former National Security Advisor Rice is a role model, according to Phyllis Schlafly who wrote, “that the picture of the woman soldier with a noose around the Iraqi man’s neck will soon show up on the bulletin boards of women’s studies centers and feminist college professors. That picture is the radical feminists’ ultimate fantasy of how they dream of treating men. Less radical feminists will quietly cheer the picture as showing career-opportunity proof that women can be just as tough as men in dealing with the enemy.”
Freaks like Schlafly are forever conjuring up vivid sexual images then projecting these fantasies as if not their own. It seems to be a win-win gimmick for releasing pent-up frustrations, whereby they get their jollies off, but pass the buck for their sins onto an unwilling participant. Rape by keyboard, no less.
Phyllis has probably spent many a sleepless night worrying that the ACLU has asked Rice & Co. to release the 1,000 or more pictures and videos the gov’t has appealed to keep from the public, so empty bulletin boards might be filled and the minds of budding feminazis can be shaped. The images, the girls, oh Phyllis.
Ann Coulter, another champion of Rice’s qualifications said, “I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek about how vicious women are, but I do think it is a serious problem having women in the military. Men are used to this sort of thing. I mean, C. S. Lewis himself said, remarking on the differences between men and women, if your dog bit a neighbor’s child, who would you like to go deal with: the woman of the house or the man of the house? Men are much more capable of engaging in combat and still being honorable about it.”
She also said, “Yeah, and, of course, we have affirmative action to get more women generals–girl generals–running the–Come on! Come on! That’s silly. No civilized society allows women in the military–this is separate and apart from the fact that you should not be allowing women to fight.”
So in the interest of keeping America civilised, shouldn’t Ann and Phyllis be baking cookies with Condi? Aren’t there three castrated men roaming the mean streets, begging for their daily bread, entitled to their positions of authority?
Coulter was the rabble-rousers’ “it” girl on the neoconservative National Review Online till they refused to publish her response to critics denouncing her 14 September 2001 recommendation that “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Editor Jonah Goldberg claimed NRO was protecting Ann (isn’t that what real men do?) from embarassment due “its sloppiness of expression and thought” and she misrepresented the facts by crying censorship before scurrying off to David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine site. Justin Raimondo, who has forgotten more about these folks than I’ll ever learn in a lifetime, noticed that when Goldberg explained events on behalf of NRO he told readers he’d just returned from his honeymoon but he didn’t mention that his bride was “chief speechwriter and senior policy advisor to Attorney General John Ashcroft.” Raimondo wondered if Coulter’s ridiculing of “lax airport security measures,” coming “just as Ashcroft was assuring the country that security was being beefed up, while the President was telling us to go on vacation – and be sure to fly,” might have had something to do with NRO‘s refusal to publish her column.
Regardless, there is a soldier out there asking to be heard and these hypocrites continue to enjoy the nation’s undivided attention. That should be wrong by anyone’s standards but most especially by those who claim to support the troops.