Burning down the house

Not quite, but last night was very exciting as we had a fire alarm. Went off at around 9pm so not as bad as it could have been. Fortunately I am on the ground floor - about ten steps from the front door. Interesting to realise your life amounts to making sure you are dressed, grabbing your laptop, official documents, cellphone and wallet. People were pretty frecked out and I'm not convinced everyone left the buildings. Still fire engines arrived complete with two female firefighters! Cool! Nothing came of it.

I am reading this book. I haven't finished it yet but it is very interesting. It's the memoir of the Commanding General of Abu Ghraib. I came to the book with my own set of prejudices. As I read her story, as she tells it, I have tremendous admiration for her. While she demonstrated a failure of leadership – her soldiers staffed the prison but overall responsibility for the prison rested with the intelligence people – I don’t believe she either fostered, encouraged nor ever believed any of her soldiers would behave like this.
She was, in reality, responsible for setting up an entire prison system through Southern Iraq. A logistical nightmare and resulting in her being spread very thin with few resources. Early on she also had concerns about having military police personnel become prison wardens, recognising they didn’t have the skills. Still she was an A-typical soldier, committed to the mission and potentially not vocal enough about the real risks in the way the whole system was being set up.

She is mightily guilty of working hard on the wrong things and being out of touch. That, in my view, is not nearly the same as actively fostering nor encouraging the abuses that occurred. Equally too she takes ownership of this and, in quite a frontal way, challenges the systemic and gendered politics that had her singled out early on. While others, who had more decision making power than her were not. That may seem trite but she explains how she heard about the photographs and how her immediate boss behaved………..these are not things the media readily report but her dialogue is very compelling and at no point does she say she doesn’t have some accountability in the whole episode………….what she does introduce is an interesting and slightly reluctant view that gender played a huge part in how the system chose to manage her situation.
Things that never came out about Janis Karpinski are that she was a pioneer throughout her career including setting up and spending five years training women to work as part of the United Arab Emerites Armed Services. She was very much a believer in the system, although always recognised that being a women in the armed services made her different and experienced all the attendant abuses, both physical and emotional.
Nothing excuses what happened but I have always felt deeply disturbed that so few in the command structure were held accountable and I remain disturbed – Kaprinski’s paid the price but there is much more to this story yet to be told.
She does offer some candid insights into her entire 25 year military career as well – I am finding the style of the book (it has been written by a journalist, using her voice) very readable.