In Case You Had any Doubt That the Iraqi Prisoner Torture (for Torture it was) story is going to get any worse, today's New York Times should end those doubts. An Army Reserve general whose soldiers were photographed as they abused Iraqi prisoners said Saturday that she knew nothing about the abuse until weeks after it occurred and that she was "sickened" by the pictures. She said the prison cellblock where the abuse occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged the abuse. The suggestion by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski that the reservists acted at the behest of military intelligence officers appears largely supported in a still-classified Army report on prison conditions in Iraq that documented many of the worst abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, including the sexual humiliation of prisoners. The New Yorker magazine said in its new edition that the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and C.I.A. agents to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses." ... In a phone interview from her home in South Carolina in which she offered her first public comments about the growing international furor over the abuse of the Iraq detainees, General Karpinski said the special high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib had been under the direct control of Army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command. She said that while the reservists involved in the abuses were "bad people" who deserved punishment, she suspected that they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She said that C.I.A. employees often joined in the interrogations at the prison, although she said she did not know if they had unrestricted access to the cellblock. ... General Karpinski said in the interview that the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen cellblocks in the large prison complex and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations, including virtually all of the military police under her command at Abu Ghraib...But she said she did not visit Cellblock 1A, in keeping with the wishes of military intelligence officers who, she said, worried that unnecessary visits might interfere with their interrogations of Iraqis. ... General Karpinski said she was speaking out because she believed that military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and other reservists and away from intelligence officers still at work in Iraq. "We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away." ... General Karpinski noted that one of the photographs of abused prisoners also showed the legs of 16 American soldiers — the photograph was cropped so that their upper bodies could not be seen — "and that tells you that clearly other people were participating, because I didn't have 16 people assigned to that cellblock." As the Arab world decides the get even more ACTIVE in expressing their contempt, and the whole Iraq situation continues to sink down the shit-hole for lack of any cogent plan beyond the land of make believe, I can see only the following from the wingnuts that continue to hug Bush to thier ideological mantle like a life-preserver... ...Get ready for the YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH defense for how this abuse occurred. I understand Lt. Calley is now selling insurance somewhere, perhaps he can provide assistance to this defense?