Janis Karpinski

President Bush has approved the demotion of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the Army Reserve commander once in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Army officials announced Thursday. The Army said she failed to properly supervise guards who in the fall of 2003 routinely abused and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners.

Army documents released Thursday substantiate assertions by Janis Karpinski, the highest-ranking officer punished in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, that she was innocent of two principal allegations lodged against her by the officer who initially investigated the case.

Army documents released Thursday substantiate assertions by Janis Karpinski, the highest-ranking officer punished in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, that she was innocent of two principal allegations lodged against her by the officer who initially investigated the case.

President Bush has approved the demotion of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the Army Reserve commander once in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Army officials announced Thursday. The Army said she failed to properly supervise guards who in the fall of 2003 routinely abused and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski turned 51 last week, but when she and her family celebrated in her native town of Rahway, N.J., they decided to stay home rather than venture out to a restaurant, not even a dimly lighted one. The woman who commanded the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade and supervised the guards at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison has become one of the most recognizable and relentlessly pursued players in an erupting international scandal over prisoner abuse.

A military judge on Saturday ordered the former commander of U.S. prisons in Iraq to testify at the trial of a soldier who says he was ordered to abuse detainees at Abu Ghraib. The judge, Army Col. James Pohl, said Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski's testimony at the trial of Sgt. Javal S. Davis would be limited to conditions at Abu Ghraib and interactions there between guards and interrogators. Davis has acknowledged stepping on the fingers and toes of detainees.

Iraqis recently freed from U.S. detention camps report that forbidden talk could earn a prisoner hours bound and stretched out in the sun and that detainees swinging tent poles rise up regularly against their jailers. "They don't respect anyone, old or young," Rahad Naif said of his U.S. Army guards. He and others told of detainees in wheelchairs, and of a man carried into a stifling hot tent in his sickbed. "They humiliate everybody."

An independent panel that included two former secretaries of Defense and a separate investigating team led by two Army generals heaped yet more withering criticism this week on the Pentagon's handling of Iraq after the invasion. The findings dealt with the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, but they should be read as condemning more than just the sickening scenes of torture documented in widely seen photographs.

U.S. military police stacked naked Iraqi prisoners in a human pyramid, and attached wires to one detainee to convince him he might be electrocuted, according to photographs obtained by CBS News that led to criminal charges against six American soldiers. CBS said the photos, shown Wednesday night on "60 Minutes II," were taken late last year at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, where American soldiers have held hundreds of prisoners captured during the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

An Army reservist accused of attaching wires to a hooded Iraqi prisoner did so in a joke shared with the prisoner, her lawyer said at the start of a court-martial Thursday. Spc. Sabrina Harman, who pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy, dereliction of duty and maltreatment, also photographed abuses because she wanted to document what she felt was wrongful behavior, lawyer Frank Spinner said. "She was upset as early as 20 October, 2003, at some of the things she was seeing.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski turned 51 last week, but when she and her family celebrated in her native town of Rahway, N.J., they decided to stay home rather than venture out to a restaurant, not even a dimly lighted one. The woman who commanded the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade and supervised the guards at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison has become one of the most recognizable and relentlessly pursued players in an erupting international scandal over prisoner abuse.

A comprehensive Army review has determined that top officers stationed in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, should not be held liable for any wrongdoing or leadership failures, congressional sources said. Reviews by the Army Inspector General's office and the Judge Advocate General, the service's top lawyer, found no substance to any allegation against Sanchez, who was the senior ground commander in Iraq, or his key staff, according to these sources.

"The Torture Question," a well-done "Frontline" documentary that airs tonight, centers squarely on the moral and tactical dilemma embedded in the U.S. fight against the Iraqi insurgency: How much psychological coercion or brute force is permissible when troops are trying to get Iraqis or imported jihadists to cough up information that could save U.S. lives? The Geneva Convention bans maltreatment of prisoners and noncombatants.