Karpinski, Janis

Military History

Ms. Karpinski, born May 25, 1953, in Rahway, New Jersey, was one of six children of Nelson Arthur and Ruth (Sorenson) Beam, and grew up in a conservative, Republican family. She was interested in a military career at an early age, but didn't actualize this interest until she completed a B.A. in teaching and met and married George Frank Karpinski in 1974. The couple decided to join the Army together in order to travel and to receive the government incentives offered to married couples and women.

She completed officer training school and was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant U.S. Army in 1977, advancing through the ranks to Captain by 1981. She was assigned to intelligence in Mannheim, Germany, and between 1985 and 1986 was commander of the military police at Fort McPherson, Georgia. She resigned from the regular Army in 1987 and joined the U.S. Army Reserve. She continued to receive security and intelligence assignments until 1991 and the onset of the Persian Gulf War, when she returned to the regular Army and a post in Saudi Arabia. For this service, she received a Bronze Star. She also worked in the United Arab Emirates helping to set up military training programs for Arab women in the Gulf region, and served as a commander of the 160th military police battalion in Tallahassee, Florida. By the time the Iraqi War began, she returned to the Reserves and was made a Brigadier General, and oversaw a prison reconstruction program in Baghdad in 2003.

General Karpinski, at that time, oversaw the Army Reserves’ 800th Military Police in Iraq, with responsibility for 17 prisons and 3,400 security personnel (Abu Ghraib and its military police among them). England, Graner, and the other security personnel charged in the Abu Ghraib incidents worked under her. However, the personnel in charge of the cell blocks where the [Page 809]violations of the Geneva Conventions took place did not. They were under the leadership of General Geoffrey Miller, formerly of the Guantánamo Bay facility.

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