Dysfunctional jails of Iraq

Iraqi prisoners could lift their cell doors right off their hinges. One senior sergeant whiled away his evenings blasting grazing sheep with a guard-tower machine gun. U.S. commanders didn’t bother telling their troops they’d be stuck in Iraq for months more than advertised.

The only woman commanding general in the war zone, Abu Ghraib prison chief Janis Karpinski, has written a memoir of her fateful year there, a portrait of an often dysfunctional U.S. Army — of “Sergeant Bilko meets Catch 22,” as she puts it.

The book, “One Woman’s Army,” sheds little new light on the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, in which Karpinski, an Army Reserve brigadier general, was the highest-ranking officer punished, being relieved of her command, reprimanded and demoted to colonel.

Karpinski maintains she didn’t know about the detainee torture and humiliation, that higher-ups encouraged the cruel treatment, and that male Army “Regulars” made her a scapegoat. She presses those points in her 209-page book.

But it’s her vignettes of an American army at war, of the hot, dusty and snafu-filled world in which her “patched-together, under-trained, overextended, poorly supported” brigade landed, that opens windows on the reality of Iraq.

It began soon after she took command in June 2003. Within weeks, just before her Reserve unit was to return to the States, she learned the Army had cut orders back in May to extend the brigade’s time in Iraq by six months. “No one had bothered to tell me,” she writes.

Bungling next plagued the hurry-up efforts to rebuild Iraq’s ransacked prisons to hold thousands of suspected Iraqi insurgents.

One day, she recounts, panicked Iraqi guards fled a Baghdad lockup, and when her MPs entered they found the prisoners milling around outside their cells. The contractor had installed the door hinges on the inside of the cells, and the inmates had simply lifted the pins out and walked free.

Visiting the U.S. occupation office responsible for prisons, Karpinski was amazed at the “anarchic accounting” and “carefree spending” in its cash-only operations. Two civilians there “had photos taken of themselves holding fists full of U.S. dollars, with more bills sticking out of their pockets,” she writes.

At times the quality of her troops also disturbed her. She tells of a sergeant major, “more like a wild animal than a leader,” who would climb Abu Ghraib’s towers at night “and unload a .50-caliber machine gun on any sheep or dogs that came in range.”

The most dispiriting “Catch 22,” Karpinski says, involved the prickly reserve-regular relationship, and her dealings with “CJTF7,” the Baghdad command. “Because we were Reserves, we had to go through CJTF7 to order spare parts, and CJTF7 would not supply us because we were Reserves.” It got to the point where most of her unit’s vehicles on the road should not have been, she says.