Thursday, January 06, 2011

An unsung heroine of the Bush ‘Dark Era’

There were a number of women who, during the eight years of the Bush regime, exemplified the spirit of this nation’s founding mothers and sisters. Women like the FBI’s Coleen Rowley and Sibel Edmonds; Enron’s Sharon Watkins; the Army Corps of Engineer’s Bunnatine Greenhouse; J.P. Morgan risk analyst Indira Singh; long-serving White House correspondent Helen Thomas; Karl Rove’s former research specialist Dana Jill Simpson; the CIA’s Valerie Plame Wilson; former U.S. Park Police chief Teresa Chambers; retired Army Colonel Ann Wright; retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski; Susan Lindauer, the CIA’s back-channel to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein; and, especially, this editor’s extraordinary girlfriend, a former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst, all of whom put the interests of the nation, its Constitution, and ethics above personal ambitions, fearlessly spoke about what was wrong, and did what was right. Add former British GCHQ analyst Katharine Gun, who proved what an ally should be.

But perhaps no one paid more of a price for telling the truth than the Bush administration’s designated scapegoat in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was busted back to the rank of colonel on May 5, 2005, before she retired. Karpinski was the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq and was demoted by President Bush in order that he and his senior officials and military commanders could save face after horrid details of the physical, mental, and sexual abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other U.S. detention centers in Iraq came to light.

Informed sources have told WMR that the scapegoating for the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and other prisons and carried out by CIA and Pentagon contractors, as well as by Israeli interrogators brought into Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority of Paul “Jerry’ Bremer, did not end with Karpinski. Two officers who publicly defended Karpinski were also retaliated against on the orders of the Pentagon hierarchy and the Bush White House. Karpinski was the highest-ranking female military commander in Iraq. She also became the number one target for the neocon mensch in the Pentagon and White House.

One military commander who defended Karpinski was retired Major General Charles H. Swannack, Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. WMR has learned that the personal contents of Swannack’s emails from Iraq back to the United States were intercepted by the Pentagon brass after he defended Karpinski over the Abu Ghraib scandal. The emails were then used to force Swannack to retire. Swannack publicly stated that the Abu Ghraib scandal was the fault of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and he later called for Rumsfeld to resign.

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