In this interview transcript.
Signal: Last week the Pentagon released memos showing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved particular interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay. To your knowledge, are there documents showing he also approved particular interrogation techniques for Abu Ghraib?
Karpinski: I did not see it personally, but since all of this has come out, I’ve not only seen, but I’ve been asked about some of those documents, that he signed and agreed to.
Signal: About Abu Ghraib?
Karpinski: Yes. About using the same techniques that were successful in Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Ghraib.
Signal: Those documents have not been released yet.
Karpinski: No.
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“…So the numbers, the population, kept growing, and at one point Gen. Wodjakowski even said to me, “I don’t care if we’re holding 15,000 innocent people. We’re winning the war.” And I said to him, very quickly, ‘Not inside the wire you’re not, sir. Every one of them is our enemy when they get out.'”
Karpinski: Now, those pictures, I believe, were staged, or set up — nonetheless, they are humiliating acts, OK? But I believe that they were staged and set up to be used to show to a detainee as they were getting ready to undergo interrogation. And you project that up on a wall, or you show that to them in living color, in 8×10 glossy, or you show it to them on a computer, and you tell them, through the interpreter, this is what has happened to some of your friends —
Signal: So you believe the pictures had a purpose, and the purpose was for them to be used to intimidate prisoners.
Karpinski: Yes.
Signal: Future subjects of interrogations.
Yes. I do. And I believe that those pictures were planned, were programmed, that they used the MPs to get the detainees out of their cells, and that there was an official set of photographs being taken.
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