Janis Karpinski Quotes
The mission statement was ordered, and it sent the 800th MP Brigade, effective the first of July, up to Baghdad. I joined my brigade to take command at the end of June.
Karpinski, Janis. "One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story." Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, 22 Nov. 2005.
The French and English, with larger numbers and more experienced troops and officers, wanted the American units to come under the command or their officers and be integrated into the allied army. However Wilson established the tradition that American troops fighting abroad most always fight as an American Army under American Command. Although resented then and into the 21st century by America’s allies who are expected to fight under American command, it is a tradition that no American major politician has seriously challenged since then.
This quotation shows the naivety of the Islamic terrorists about America. They assumed that because the Federal Government did not send help to New Orleans and other communities hit by the hurricane, it was because there was a shortage of military personnel to send and they took credit for tying down all the troops. They just could not accept the possibility that some American administrations were totally incompetent and were not be prepared or that an American President could appoint someone with no real qualification. Ironically, they would believe that of the Arab countries in the Middle East, but not the vaunted USA. The terrible response to Katrina had nothing to do with the shortage of troops and civilian first line responders. There were more than enough. They just were never prepared and never deployed on time.
This seemingly prosaic quotation is one of the most significant quotations in history. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the telegraph was rapidly developing as a communications technology. One of Lincoln’s greatest achievements was the appreciation of the new technology and the deployment of it to gain an immense strategic advantage which was a major factor in all warfare thereafter. Lincoln placed ALL telegraphy of the North under the control of the military. He then had a telegraph terminal installed in the War Department right next to the White House. He would spend many hours in the Telegraph Room reading dispatches as they were coming in. To the distress of some of his military commanders, the Commander in Chief actually, for the first time in history, received virtually real time intelligence about a battle, and issued orders to the commanders in the field in real time. The quotation is one of the early examples. Ironically, Lincoln had more real time battlefields information in the Civil War than most of our Presidents did until the Vietnam War when digital, radio communications were exploited for the purpose.
Janis Leigh Karpinski is a retired career officer in the United States Army Reserve. She is notable for having commanded the forces that operated Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at the time of the scandal related to torture and prisoner abuse. She commanded three prisons in Iraq and the forces that ran them. Her education includes a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and secondary education from Kean College, a Master of Arts degree in aviation management from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and a Master of Arts in strategic studies from the United States Army War College.
