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• Excerpt from One Woman's Army
• Article on Col. Karpinski
• Q & A with Col. Karpinski

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Tavis: Janis Karpinski was the commanding general of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the now infamous prisoner abuse scandal. Following the ordeal, she was relieved of duty and demoted to Colonel. She was the most senior Army official charged in the Abu Ghraib case. She now tells her side of the story in a new book called "One Woman's Army: A Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story". Ms. Karpinski, nice to have you on the program.

Janis Karpinski: Nice to be here. Thank you very much.

Tavis: Glad to have you. Can I start with the cover of this book? If John could put that back up for a minute, the cover of the book. Once I got a chance to read the book and started going through it, I was actually fascinated with what you have to say in the book which isn't necessarily kind to the military. We'll get to that in a second.

What you say in the book is one thing, but somebody let you get away with wearing your uniform on the cover of the book. This is a Defense Department that won't even let bodies coming to Dover be seen. They shut down on stuff like this. How did you get to wear your uniform on the cover of a book saying this kind of stuff?

Karpinski: Well, my photograph was, you know, brought all over the world because they wanted it to be forever in conjunction with those photographs that were released, so it's a matter of public record and anybody can use the photograph. So I was a general. They can't deny that, although they'd like to, and that's part of my history.

Tavis: It's fascinating. It's a simple answer and I'm glad you answered it, but I was just fascinated by the juxtaposition of you in this uniform with I know they're not being happy with what you have to say in this book. That said, forget them not being happy. Let's talk about you for a moment. To begin with, how does it feel to be the first woman to command U.S. troops in a war zone and then to be, months later, the highest-ranking military official who the government goes after for what happened in Abu Ghraib? Those are two dispirit positions.

Karpinski: It is, isn't it? It was one of the reasons why I wrote the book because they tried to destroy my credibility altogether, to make it appear that somehow I'd crawled out of a cave and said, "Make me a general and send me to Iraq". I have a career. I worked very hard for every one of my promotions and they realized while I was serving there -- and soldiers were talking about it -- you know, you're the first female general to serve in a combat zone, to command troops in a combat zone.

I think that that made a lot of people nervous. General Sanchez, the commander of all the forces in Iraq, all the way up to the Pentagon. So they knew they needed to do something. Now I'm not suggesting that they set these pictures up in order to get to me, but I was the perfect target once those pictures emerged.

Tavis: I'm glad you made that distinction. It's one thing to suggest that they set these pictures up to come after you and, to your point, you're not suggesting that. It is another thing, though, perhaps legitimate, to say that they came after you because you are a woman. Talk to me about your feelings on that front.

Karpinski: Absolutely. From the beginning, and I knew that, you know, we were not going to be welcomed with open arms when we arrived in Baghdad because --

Tavis: -- Mr. Bush didn't know that. That's not what he told us.

Karpinski: Well, exactly.

Tavis: People would be cheering in the streets and, anyway --

Karpinski: By the time the brigade got there, we were handling this completely new mission that had been assigned, kind of dropped in our laps. But like usual, Reserve and National Guard soldiers will say, hey, this is the hand we've been dealt and we're going to go forward and do this. But we were Reserve and National Guard soldiers. We're all supposed to be part of this "one army" concept, but not true. There's still the active component and then there's the Reserve and the National Guard and we were relegated to second class status at best.

Tavis: I'm glad you raised that because I was fascinated to learn that -- and this is my own assessment -- that what rankles you as much and maybe even more, and this is what you get from real generals. They're always concerned about their troops. I get the sense that you are as upset at how your officers, your troops, were treated as second class citizens. That bothered you as much as what happened to you.

Karpinski: Absolutely, and that bothered me more because they didn't have a voice. They weren't the ones that were being targeted. I mean, if you think about this, Reserve and National Guard soldiers bring a variety of skills and qualifications and training to the table. So I have lawyers and doctors and bank managers and assembly line supervisors and a wide variety. Nobody is going to compromise their bread and butter on the table, so to speak.

They're going back to face their colleagues, their families and their employers when they get back to the states. So they're not going to allow something like this to happen on their watch. This information was kept from all of them and, for them to be accused and guilty by association simply by being assigned to the 800th MP Brigade, that was really devastating.

Tavis: Share some examples of what you mean by this dual treatment, this dispirit treatment, I should say, between the active military and these Reservists.

Karpinski: Well, Reserve and National Guard units deployed without the appropriate equipment. They didn't have -- in some cases, the soldiers didn't even have the protective vests. If they had the vests, they didn't have the plates to be very effective inside. Now Reserve and National Guard soldiers see this. They see their colleagues who are active components. They have all of the bells and whistles. They have the vests, they have the right vehicles.

In many cases, for example, the entire staff, General Sanchez's staff, they're in the comfort of the Green Zone, Camp Victory. They have their protective vests in a lot of cases hung on the back of their chairs. Their Kevlar under their workstation. Meanwhile, my soldiers who are out there on the road in harm's way don't have the vests, they don't have the right vehicles. You look at these places where nobody's leaving the Green Zone and here are these armored vehicles. Who do they belong to? The active component units that aren't out there in harm's way.

Tavis: Before we get to who you think is responsible here because you are not shy about naming names. We'll get to that in a second how high up you think this responsibility and accountability should have gone. That said, though, let's talk first about your connection to Abu Ghraib. Were you responsible for Abu Ghraib in terms of its geography and, more expressly, were you responsible for what went wrong inside Abu Ghraib?

Karpinski: I'll answer the first question first. I was absolutely not responsible for what went wrong in Cellblock 1-A or B because interrogation is separate and apart from detention operations. However, I will never abandon soldiers that have been assigned to a unit that was subordinate to one of my battalions. The 372nd was. If those soldiers don't have me to represent them and continue to represent them, they have nobody. Because they would be abandoned like they were hoping would happen.

I was responsible for not only Abu Ghraib, but sixteen other prison facilities. Detention operations in those facilities, heavily looted, in complete disrepair when we first got to those facilities and soldiers who had no engineering background, for the most part, are rebuilding these facilities so they can take prisoners in and treat them humanely and fairly until they've served their time and then can be released. The original plan was then to turn this back over to the Iraqis to take back control of their security, their detention operations, but there weren't the experts in Ambassador Bremer's headquarters to do that, so he relied almost completely on the Military Police personnel.

Tavis: You keep saying "detention". I assume the distinction you're making here is that you were responsible for detention and not for the interrogation.

Karpinski: That's correct.

Tavis: And the tactics associated with it that caused this scandal to --

Karpinski: That's correct. Now General Miller, who was the Commander at Guantanamo Bay for detention and interrogation operations, was sent to Iraq to work with the interrogators, the military intelligence interrogators, not the MPs, to help them improve their techniques, to get more actionable intelligence from their interrogations. He did not discuss any of this with me because interrogations were not my lane. As I said, we were running detention in a lot of different facilities.

But following his visit, things started to change in interrogations at Abu Ghraib and Abu Ghraib was the only facility where interrogations were in fact taking place, at least in any of my facilities. I know much more today, but at that time, he said that he was going to make Abu Ghraib the center for interrogation operations for Iraq, and he did.

Tavis: Okay. So you've made this distinction now between detention and interrogation. Detention was your bailiwick, interrogation was not, and yet you end up being the person who they nabbed for what went wrong inside this prison. So if not Janis Karpinski, who should have been the highest-ranking person held accountable for this?

Karpinski: Well, in order to determine that, you have to trek back to where this departure happened.

Tavis: Okay.

Karpinski: Military Police personnel, particularly Reserve and National Guard units that do prisoner of war operations almost exclusively -- the active component doesn't like that mission -- they are well-schooled and well-trained in the Geneva Conventions. They understand all those procedures. They understand humane treatment. Interrogators have a completely different objective. They want information. They were allowed, as a result of a discussion shortly after 9/11, there was this discussion between Alberto Gonzalez before he became the Attorney General all the way up to the president.

This is why Geneva Conventions do not apply. These are terrorists. We need to deal with them on their level. That first departure from the Geneva Conventions, from the rules that apply in order to protect us and how we behave with other prisoners, that allowed a complete departure from anything that we would ordinarily do in any situation to include lists of -- you know, in Iraq, it was an eight-page memorandum signed by General Sanchez authorizing things to include the use of dogs and un-muzzled dogs with his specific permission. So when you take a slight detour, eventually it becomes a very large departure.

Tavis: What you just said, though, you went right past the Joint Chiefs. You went past the Defense Department. I thought I just heard you say -- I thought I just saw you inside the Oval Office.

Karpinski: Absolutely. That discussion was held and everybody knows that that discussion was held. I wasn't there, of course, but we know today that that discussion, that initial discussion, when they were discussing why doesn't the Geneva Convention -- or why shouldn't it -- apply with these particular prisoners.

Tavis: So how angry does it make you that you know this, I know this, anybody who reads any newspaper or watches news knows this? This all came out again when Gonzalez was confirmed as AG and what the White House had signed off on, how they were abrogating the Geneva Conventions? So the whole world knows this and yet you are the one held responsible for what somebody in the Oval Office did to say we can slide on this, we can get around this, we can circumvent this. How angry does that make you?

Karpinski: Well, I think that anger is exhausting, so I've tried to focus what would normally be anger into determination, pursuing the truth, telling the story and getting more people involved in the pursuit of the truth.

Tavis: What repercussions potentially await you for writing a book like this or have you already been punished enough that you don't care at this point?

Karpinski: Well, I am a private citizen. I've retired from the military and, if they wanted to do anything else, I suppose they would have done it. I don't know what the limits are anymore because it just seems that, at some junctures, people were telling a lie and repeating it thinking that it would somehow become the truth. It doesn't.

Tavis: Let me ask you as an exit question. It was fascinating. I'm going to obviously recommend highly the book and we'll get to that in just a second here in case you're just tuning in. But tell me what happens to you now. How is your life progressing? I mean, you get demoted from -- I can't imagine. My dad was in the military for thirty-seven years, but he was not a general -- I can't imagine being a general and demoted to colonel.

Karpinski: Right.

Tavis: I mean, tell me about you and your life and how you're doing.

Karpinski: Now you want to open that wound just a little bit more?

Tavis: I'm sorry.

Karpinski: No, I'm serious because this is part of the inspiration. Nobody, to include the Chief of the Army Reserves who's a three-star, nobody in a chain of command called me, summoned me to an office to tell me I was relieved from command. I found out about it from a reporter who just came from a Pentagon briefing who called me on my cell phone and asked for a comment. I said, "Pertaining to what?" He said, "Well, I understand that you've been relieved from command." I said, "No, I think you have the wrong information." He said, "General, I just came from a Pentagon briefing and that's what they put out." That's how I found out. Nobody has ever called me, never exchanged a word of conversation with me. That's leaders who have become cowards.

Tavis: The book, "One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story." Janis Karpinski, an honor to have you here.

Karpinski: My pleasure. Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: Up next, former "The Tonight Show" star, Ed McMahon, out with a new book, speaking of books. His is called "Here's Johnny". Ed will be here in a moment. Stay with us.