Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments and circuitry-based music technology. In general, a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means, that produced using electronics only. Electromechanical instruments include mechanical elements, such as strings, so on, electric elements, such as magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Examples of electromechanical sound producing devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, the electric guitar, which are made loud enough for performers and audiences to hear with an instrument amplifier and speaker cabinet. Pure electronic instruments do not have vibrating strings, hammers, or other sound-producing mechanisms. Devices such as the theremin and computer can produce electronic sounds; the first electronic devices for performing music were developed at the end of the 19th century, shortly afterward Italian futurists explored sounds that had not been considered musical.
During the 1920s and 1930s, electronic instruments were introduced and the first compositions for electronic instruments were made. By the 1940s, magnetic audio tape allowed musicians to tape sounds and modify them by changing the tape speed or direction, leading to the development of electroacoustic tape music in the 1940s, in Egypt and France. Musique concrète, created in Paris in 1948, was based on editing together recorded fragments of natural and industrial sounds. Music produced from electronic generators was first produced in Germany in 1953. Electronic music was created in Japan and the United States beginning in the 1950s. An important new development was the advent of computers to compose music. Algorithmic composition with computers was first demonstrated in the 1950s. In the 1960s, live electronics were pioneered in America and Europe, Japanese electronic musical instruments began influencing the music industry, Jamaican dub music emerged as a form of popular electronic music. In the early 1970s, the monophonic Minimoog synthesizer and Japanese drum machines helped popularize synthesized electronic music.
In the 1970s, electronic music began having a significant influence on popular music, with the adoption of polyphonic synthesizers, electronic drums, drum machines, turntables, through the emergence of genres such as disco, new wave, synth-pop, hip hop and EDM. In the 1980s, electronic music became more dominant in popular music, with a greater reliance on synthesizers, the adoption of programmable drum machines such as the Roland TR-808 and bass synthesizers such as the TB-303. In the early 1980s, digital technologies for synthesizers including digital synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 were popularized, a group of musicians and music merchants developed the Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Electronically produced music became prevalent in the popular domain by the 1990s, because of the advent of affordable music technology. Contemporary electronic music includes many varieties and ranges from experimental art music to popular forms such as electronic dance music. Today, pop electronic music is most recognizable in its 4/4 form and more connected with the mainstream culture as opposed to its preceding forms which were specialized to niche markets.
At the turn of the 20th century, experimentation with emerging electronics led to the first electronic musical instruments. These initial inventions were not sold, but were instead used in demonstrations and public performances; the audiences were presented with reproductions of existing music instead of new compositions for the instruments. While some were considered novelties and produced simple tones, the Telharmonium synthesized the sound of orchestral instruments, it achieved viable public interest and made commercial progress into streaming music through telephone networks. Critics of musical conventions at the time saw promise in these developments. Ferruccio Busoni encouraged the composition of microtonal music allowed for by electronic instruments, he predicted the use of machines in future music, writing the influential Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music. Futurists such as Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo began composing music with acoustic noise to evoke the sound of machinery.
They predicted expansions in timbre allowed for by electronics in the influential manifesto The Art of Noises. Developments of the vacuum tube led to electronic instruments that were smaller and more practical for performance. In particular, the theremin, ondes Martenot and trautonium were commercially produced by the early 1930s. From the late 1920s, the increased practicality of electronic instruments influenced composers such as Joseph Schillinger to adopt them, they were used within orchestras, most composers wrote parts for the theremin that could otherwise be performed with string instruments. Avant-garde composers criticized the predominant use of electronic instruments for conventional purposes; the instruments offered expansions in pitch resources that were exploited by advocates of microtonal music such as Charles Ives, Dimitrios Levidis, Olivier Messiaen and Edgard Varèse. Further, Percy Grainger used the theremin to abandon fixed tonation while Russian composers such as Gavriil Popov treated it as a source of noise in otherwise-acoustic noise music.
Developments in early recording technology paralleled that of electronic instruments. The first means of recording and reproducing audio was invented in the late 19th century with the mechanical phonograph. Record players became a common household item, by the 1920s comp
Danny Elfman
Daniel Robert Elfman is an American composer, singer and record producer. Elfman first became known for being the lead singer and songwriter for the band Oingo Boingo from 1974 to 1995, he is well known for scoring films and television shows his frequent collaborations with director Tim Burton. In 1976, Elfman entered the film industry as an actor. In 1980, he scored Forbidden Zone, directed by his older brother Richard Elfman. Among his honors are four Oscar nominations, a Grammy for Batman, an Emmy for Desperate Housewives, six Saturn Awards for Best Music, the 2002 Richard Kirk Award, the Disney Legend Award. Danny Elfman was born on May 29, 1953 in Los Angeles, California to a Jewish family from Poland and Russia, he is the son of Blossom Elfman, a writer and teacher, Milton Elfman, a teacher, in the Air Force. He was raised in a racially mixed affluent community in California, he spent much of his time in the neighborhood's local movie theater, adoring the music of such film composers as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman.
Stating that he hung out with the "band geeks" in high school, he started a ska band. After dropping out of high school, he followed his brother Richard to France, where he performed with Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical theater group, he was never a student at the CalArts, but an instructor there encouraged him to continue learning. Elfman stated, "He just laughed, said,'Sit. Play.' I continued to sit and play for a couple years." At this time, his brother Richard was forming a new musical theater group. In 1972 Richard Elfman founded the American new wave band/performance art group called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, they played several shows throughout the 1970s until Richard Elfman left the band to become a filmmaker. As a send-off to the band's original concept, Richard Elfman created the film Forbidden Zone based on their stage performances. Danny Elfman played the role of Satan. By the time the movie was completed, they had taken the name Oingo Boingo and begun recording and touring as a rock group.
From 1976 and on, it was led by Danny Elfman, until 1995 when they retired. The semi-theatrical music and comedy troupe had transformed into a ska-influenced new wave band in 1979, changed again towards a more guitar-oriented rock sound, in the late 1980s.. Oingo Boingo, still led by Danny Elfman, performed as themselves in the 1986 movie Back to School. Additionally, Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek reunited on October 31, 2015 to perform the song "Dead Man's Party" – "for the first time in 20 years to the day", as Elfman said to the audience – during an encore at a Halloween celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. In 1985, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens invited Elfman to write the score for their first feature film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Elfman was apprehensive at first, because of his lack of formal training, but with orchestration assistance from Oingo Boingo guitarist and arranger Steve Bartek, he achieved his goal of emulating the mood of such composers as Nino Rota and Bernard Herrmann.
In the booklet for the first volume of Music for a Darkened Theatre, Elfman described the first time he heard his music played by a full orchestra as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life. Elfman developed a rapport with Burton and has gone on to score all but three of Burton's major studio releases: Ed Wood, under production while Elfman and Burton were having a serious disagreement, Sweeney Todd and, most Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Elfman provided the singing voice for Jack Skellington in Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and the voices of both Barrel and the "Clown with the Tear-Away Face". In 1990, Elfman composed the iconic orchestra piece, "Ice Dance", for the Tim Burton film Edward Scissorhands. Years he provided the voice for Bonejangles the skeleton in Corpse Bride and the voices of the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. One of Elfman's notable compositions is The Simpsons theme, which he wrote in 1989. In 2002 Elfman composed the soundtracks for the Sam Raimi Spider-Man series, except for Spider-Man 3, to which he contributed a variety of work on the soundtrack, but did not compose the soundtrack.
In October 2013, Elfman returned to the stage to sing his vocal parts to a handful of Nightmare Before Christmas songs as part of a concert titled Danny Elfman's Music from the Films of Tim Burton. He composed the film score for Oz the Great and Powerful, composed additional music for Avengers: Age of Ultron together with Brian Tyler. Elfman composed the score for all three of the Fifty Shades films. Elfman's film scores were featured in the 2017 production SCORE: A Film Music Documentary; that year, he took over the place of composer in the DCEU's Justice League and was able to reprise parts of his own score from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman for the new incarnation of the character. In 2004 Elfman composed Serenada Schizophrana for the American Composers Orchestra, it was conducted by John Mauceri on its recording and by Steven Sloane at its premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York City on February 23, 2005. After its premiere, it was recorded in studio and released onto SACD on October 3, 2006; the meeting with Mauceri proved fruitful as the composer was encouraged to write a new concert piece for Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.
Elfman composed an "overture to a non-existent musical" and called the piece "The Overeager Overture". 2017 saw the premiere of his 40-minute Concerto for Violin & Orchestra in Prague, with soloist Sandy Cameron
Documentary film
A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. "Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, mode of audience reception", continually evolving and is without clear boundaries. Documentary films were called'actuality' films and were only a minute or less in length. Over time documentaries have evolved to be longer in length and to include more categories, such as educational and even'docufiction'. Documentaries are educational and used in schools to teach various principles. Social media platforms such as YouTube, have allowed documentary films to improve the ways the films are distributed and able to educate and broaden the reach of people who receive the information. Polish writer and filmmaker Bolesław Matuszewski was among those who identified the mode of documentary film, he wrote two of the earliest texts on cinema Une nouvelle source de l'histoire and La photographie animée.
Both were published in 1898 in French and among the early written works to consider the historical and documentary value of the film. Matuszewski is among the first filmmakers to propose the creation of a Film Archive to collect and keep safe visual materials. In popular myth, the word documentary was coined by Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana, published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by "The Moviegoer". Grierson's principles of documentary were that cinema's potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form. In this regard, Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some acceptance, with this position at variance with Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov's provocation to present "life as it is" and "life caught unawares"; the American film critic Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film, dramatic." Others further state that a documentary stands out from the other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, a specific message, along with the facts it presents.
Documentary practice is the complex process of creating documentary projects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content and production strategies in order to address the creative and conceptual problems and choices that arise as they make documentaries. Documentary filmmaking can be used as a form of advocacy, or personal expression. Early film was dominated by the novelty of showing an event, they were single-shot moments captured on film: a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work. These short films were called "actuality" films. Many of the first films, such as those made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, were a minute or less in length, due to technological limitations. Films showing many people were made for commercial reasons: the people being filmed were eager to see, for payment, the film showing them. One notable film clocked in at over an hour and The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight. Using pioneering film-looping technology, Enoch J. Rector presented the entirety of a famous 1897 prize-fight on cinema screens across the United States.
In May 1896, Bolesław Matuszewski recorded on film few surigical operations in Warsaw and Saint Petersburg hospitals. In 1898, French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen invited Bolesław Matuszewski and Clément Maurice and proposed them to recorded his surigical operations, they started in Paris a series of surgical films sometime before July 1898. Until 1906, the year of his last film, Doyen recorded more than 60 operations. Doyen said that his first films taught him how to correct professional errors he had been unaware of. For scientific purposes, after 1906, Doyen combined 15 of his films into three compilations, two of which survive, the six-film series Extirpation des tumeurs encapsulées, the four-film Les Opérations sur la cavité crânienne; these and five other of Doyen's films survive. Between July 1898 and 1901, the Romanian professor Gheorghe Marinescu made several science films in his neurology clinic in Bucharest: Walking Troubles of Organic Hemiplegy, The Walking Troubles of Organic Paraplegies, A Case of Hysteric Hemiplegy Healed Through Hypnosis, The Walking Troubles of Progressive Locomotion Ataxy, Illnesses of the Muscles.
All these short films have been preserved. The professor called his works "studies with the help of the cinematograph," and published the results, along with several consecutive frames, in issues of "La Semaine Médicale" magazine from Paris, between 1899 and 1902. In 1924, Auguste Lumiere recognized the merits of Marinescu's science films: "I've seen your scientific reports about the usage of the cinematograph in studies of nervous illnesses, when I was still receiving "La Semaine Médicale," but back I had other concerns, which left me no spare time to begin biological studies. I must say I am thankful to you that you reminded them to me. Not many scientists have followed your way." Travelogue films were popular in the early part of the 20th century. They were referred to by distributors as "scenics." Scenics were among the most popu
The Unknown Known
The Unknown Known is a 2013 American documentary film about the political career of former U. S. Secretary of Defense and congressman Donald Rumsfeld, directed by Academy Award winning documentarian and filmmaker Errol Morris; the film is a summary of 33 hours of interviews that Morris conducted with Rumsfeld over eleven separate sessions during visits to Newton, Massachusetts. It is dedicated to the memory of Roger Ebert; the film was released on April 4, 2014, by Radius-TWC. The major portion of the film is spent addressing excerpts from the countless memos, nicknamed'Yellow Perils' by his first Pentagon staff and'Snowflakes' by the second, that Rumsfeld wrote during his time as a congressman and advisor to four different presidents, twice as United States Secretary of Defense, it focuses on a response Rumsfeld gave to a question at a U. S. Department of Defense news briefing on February 12, 2002, about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.
The content of the memos are varied, covering everything from the aftermath of Watergate, to the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, to the definition of the word "terrorism". Morris returns to the motif of snowflakes swirling within a globe throughout the documentary as he discusses the memos with Rumsfeld, the contents of which the Defense Secretary allowed him limited access while preparing the film, several of which Rumsfeld agrees to read aloud on camera. At the beginning of the documentary, Rumsfeld argues that a major purpose of the Department of Defense is to evaluate "unknown knowns," or "the things you think you know, that it turns out you did not," to anticipate hostile actions before they take place. Illustrating his point, Rumsfeld suggests that the failure of the United States to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor was a failure of imagination; as the interviews proceed, the director is able to catch his subject lying on camera, though when he does, Rumsfeld does not acknowledge it, with Morris finding the politician unwilling or unable to engage in self-reflection.
When the director asks him about the lessons he learnt from the Vietnam War, for example, Rumsfeld replies tersely: "Some things work out, some things don’t. Rumsfeld expresses good-natured surprise at the list of torture techniques — including hooding, stress positions, nudity — that he approved for use on Guantánamo detainees, stating, "Good grief! That’s a pile of stuff!" In follow up, Morris questions him about the so-called "Torture Memos" describing enhanced interrogation techniques. When Rumsfeld replies that he never read them, Morris responds in disbelief, "Really?" When asked if the Iraq War was a mistake, Rumsfeld replies, "I guess time will tell."In the penultimate scene, Morris questions him again about "unknown knowns," and the definition given by Rumsfeld has inverted, a discongruence the director is quick to point out, which Rumsfeld acknowledges: "unknown knowns" are "things that you know, that you don't know you know." As the documentary closes, Morris asks Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld responds, "That is a vicious question.
I'll be darned if I know." Donald Rumsfeld – himself Errol Morris – himself Kenn Medeiros – younger Donald Rumsfeld / Secret Service The Unknown Known was screened in the main competition section at the 70th Venice International Film Festival, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on August 29, 2013. The documentary has an 84% approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 105 reviews with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Viewers hoping to see Donald Rumsfeld admit making mistakes in public office may find The Unknown Known frustrating – but no less fascinating." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 69 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". David Denby of The New Yorker wrote, "If Morris doesn’t quite nail Rumsfeld, his questions lead the Secretary to nail himself. You watch him obfuscate, fudge the issue of torture, smirk about George H. W. Bush, offer dull commonplaces when impassioned clarity is called for."
Mary Corliss of Time wrote, "Morris's movie is a cat-and-mouse game, Rumsfeld is the cat licking his chops as he toys with, devours, another rival." Colin Colvert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote, "Morris is admirably evenhanded, never demonizing his subject, but giving him enough rope to hang himself. Rumsfeld and bemused, refuses to knot the noose." Several reviews of the documentary compare it to Morris's Academy Award-winning predecessor, The Fog of War, with the follow-up being described as a "spiritual sequel". The earlier documentary is about Robert McNamara, the longest serving U. S. Secretary of Defense, with Rumsfeld being the second. Both are film interviews of former Defense Secretary octogenarians who were dismissed prematurely from their posts, who discuss their roles as the voice of some of the most unpopular wars in recent American history – for McNamara and for Rumsfeld, Iraq. At one point, Morris asks Rumsfeld, "Have you seen The Fog of War? What do you think about that?" to which Rumsfeld responds, "I hate it.
That man had nothing to apologize for." Morris himself has been resistant to comparisons, stating "You can’t call this ‘The Fog of War 2.’ I can’t imagine two individuals more unalike." The Unknown Known at AllMovie The Unknown Known at Box Office Mojo The Unknown Known on IMDb The Unknown Known at Metacritic The Unknown Known at RogerEbert.com The Unknown Known at Rotten Tomatoes
Taxi to the Dark Side
Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 American documentary film directed by Alex Gibney, produced by him, Eva Orner, Susannah Shipman. It won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, it focuses on the December 2002 killing of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention and interrogated at a black site at Bagram air base. It was part of the Why Democracy? series, which consisted of ten documentary films from around the world questioning and examining contemporary democracy. As part of this series, the documentary was broadcast in over 30 countries from October 8–18, 2007; the BBC showed the film in its Storyville series. Taxi to the Dark Side examines US policy on torture and interrogation the CIA's use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation; the film includes discussions against the use of torture by political and military opponents, as well as the defense of such methods. The documentary background to the death of Dilawar, an Afghan peanut farmer, who gave up farming to become a taxi driver, who died after several days of beating at Bagram detention center.
Dilawar left his home of Yakubi in eastern Afghanistan in the autumn of 2002, investing his family money in a new taxi to make money in a larger city. On 1 December 2002 he and three passengers were handed over to US military officials by a local Afghan warlord, accused of organising an attack on Camp Salerno; the warlord was found guilty of the attack himself, but had been ingratiating himself by handing over alleged terrorists. Dilawar was held at the prison at Bagram Air Base, given the prisoner number BT421. Chained from the ceiling, he received multiple attacks on his thighs, a standard technique viewed as "permissible" and non-life-threatening, it is that the severe attack caused a blood clot which killed him. His official death certificate created by the US military to pass to his family, with his body, was marked "homicide". Medical conclusion stated that Dilawar's legs were "pulpified" and, had he lived, would have required amputation; the film explores the background of sanctioned "torture" since 9/11 in contravention of the Geneva Convention and looks at the exposures of Abu Graib.
Interviews include Tim Golden of The New York Times who brought the case into the international spotlight, Moazzam Begg, a British citizen imprisoned at the same time, witness to the events. Military interviewees include Damien Corsetti the main interrogator, Sgt Anthony Morden. Cpt Christopher Beiring explains; the documentary claims that of the over 83,000 people incarcerated by US forces in Afghanistan up to 2007, 93 percent were captured by local militiamen and exchanged for US bounty payments. That 105 detainees had died in captivity and that 37 of these deaths had been classified as homicides up to 2007; the film looks at Guantánamo Bay and how the same techniques were implemented there. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on April 28, 2007. Taxi to the Dark Side appeared on some critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008. Premiere magazine named it the fifth best film of 2008, Bill White of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer named it the seventh-best film of 2008.
The film scored 100% for critic approval, out of 91 reviews, on Rotten Tomatoes. It was named by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of 15 films on its documentary feature Oscar shortlist in November 2007, won the Oscar on February 24, 2008. In his acceptance speech for the "Best Documentary Feature" Academy Award, Gibney said: This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, the young Afghan taxi driver, my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let's hope we can move away from the dark side and back to the light, it won a Peabody Award in 2007 "for its sober, meticulous argument that what happened to a hapless Afghani was not an aberration but, the inevitable result of a consciously approved, widespread policy." Additionally, Gibney received the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay at the 60th Writers Guild of America Awards. In June 2007, the Discovery Channel bought the rights to broadcast Taxi to the Dark Side.
However, in February 2008, it made public its intention never to broadcast the documentary due to its controversial nature. HBO bought rights to the film and announced that it would be broadcast in September 2008, after which the Discovery Channel announced it would broadcast Taxi to the Dark Side in 2009. In June 2008, Gibney's company filed for arbitration, arguing that THINKFilm failed to properly distribute and promote the film following its release and Oscar win. Standard Operating Procedure Torturing Democracy Jan Baz Mohammed al-Qahtani – Guantanamo detainee discussed in the film Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse Extraordinary rendition by the United States Christopher Beiring Canadian Afghan detainee abuse scandal Bagram torture and prisoner abuse List of films with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a film review aggregator website Washington Post - Down a Dark Road by Richard Leiby BBC News - Torture film wins Tribeca award Variety review by Jay Weissberg Interview with Taxi to the Dark Side director Alex Gibney at Filmmaker Magazine Pullquote review Taxi to the Dark Side on IMDb
Janis Karpinski
Janis Leigh Karpinski is a career officer in the US Army Reserve, now retired. 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, 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, a Master of Arts in strategic studies from the U. S. Army War College. In June 2003, during the U. S.-led occupation of Iraq, Karpinski was given command of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which meant she was responsible for the 15 detention facilities in southern and central Iraq run by Coalition forces. Karpinski was given command of the National Guard and Army reserve units in the Iraqi city of Mosul. In January 2004, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez formally suspended Karpinski and 16 other soldiers with undisclosed reprimands.
An investigation was started into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski left Iraq for reasons that were explained at the time as part of "routine troop rotations." On April 8, 2005, Karpinski was formally relieved of command of the 800th Military Police Brigade. On May 5, 2005, President George W. Bush approved Karpinski's demotion to Colonel from the rank of Brigadier General, her demotion was not related to the abuse at Abu Ghraib. In October 2005, she published an account of her experiences, One Woman's Army, in which she claims that the abuses were done by contract employees trained in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, sent to Abu Ghraib under orders from the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, she said. Since this time, some of Karpinski's claim of top-level authorization have been affirmed by revelations of what are known as the Torture Memos, legal opinions prepared by political appointees including John Yoo in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, his memo of March 14, 2003, five days before the US began its invasion of Iraq, concluded that federal laws related to torture and other abuses did not apply to interrogators working overseas.
Karpinski was commissioned into the Army as a Second Lieutenant in 1977. She served in intelligence and military police assignments, training the first group of female soldiers for the United Arab Emirates, toured supporting the Special Forces and in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, she was awarded a Bronze Star. In 1987, she moved from the regular Army to the Army Reserve. In the private sector, she became a consultant who ran military-styled training programs for executives, she is married to a Lieutenant Colonel at the Oman US embassy. In June 2003, during the U. S.-led occupation of Iraq, Karpinski was in command of the 800th Military Police Brigade placing her in charge of the fifteen detention facilities in southern and central Iraq run by Coalition forces. She had no experience running correctional facilities. Karpinski was given command of the National Guard and Army reserve units in the Iraqi city of Mosul who handled prisoners. Most of the forces had no training in handling prisoners.
But at least two of the guardsmen convicted of prisoner abuse had lengthy civilian experience as prison guards. In September 2003, Karpinski led US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on a tour of the Abu Ghraib prison to demonstrate the way it had been used by Saddam Hussein to torture his enemies. In October 2003, allegations of torture in the US-managed Iraqi prisons began to surface. Karpinski insisted that prisoners under her watch were treated "humanely and fairly". In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times in December 2003, Karpinski said conditions in the prison were better than many Iraqi homes, joked that the prisoners were treated so well that she was "concerned they wouldn't want to leave."In January 2004, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez formally suspended Karpinski and 16 other soldiers with undisclosed reprimands. An investigation was started into the abuse. Karpinski was reassigned in what was said at the time to be part of "routine troop rotations." In July 2003, Karpinski stated.
On April 8, 2005, Karpinski was formally relieved of command of the 800th Military Police Brigade. On May 5, 2005, President Bush approved Karpinski's demotion to Colonel from the rank of Brigadier General, her demotion was not related to the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The allegations against her were for dereliction of duty, making a material misrepresentation to investigators, failure to obey a lawful order and shoplifting. Military sources alleged that Karpinski had been arrested in 2002 on MacDill Air Force Base for stealing cosmetics, but Karpinski has denied the arrest took place. In his final report, Major General Antonio Taguba blamed Karpinski for the abuse, indicating she had not paid attention to the daily operations of the prison. According to Taguba, Karpinski visited the prisons during her tenure, she reviewed and signed reports about claims of abuse without following up to make sure her orders were carried out; as a consequence, the abuse was allowed to continue and her subordinates developed a lax attitude towards protocol.
Karpinski was cited throughout the Taguba Report for repeated violations of Army procedure, good management and exercising her command as directed by Army regulations. During interviews cited in the Taguba report, Karpinski was described as disconnected from the
Abu Ghraib prison
Abu Ghraib prison is a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, located 32 kilometers west of Baghdad. Abu Ghraib prison was opened in the 1950s and served as a maximum-security prison with torture, weekly executions, vile living conditions. From the 1980s the prison was used by Saddam Hussein to hold political prisoners, developing a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killing, was closed in 2002. Abu Ghraib gained international attention in 2003 following the Invasion of Iraq, when a scandal involving the torture and abuse of detainees committed by guards in part of the complex operated by US-led Coalition occupation forces was exposed. In 2006, the United States transferred complete control of Abu Ghraib to the Federal government of Iraq, was reopened in 2009 as Baghdad Central Prison but was closed in 2014 due to security concerns from the Iraqi Civil War; the prison complex is vacant, Saddam-era mass graves have been uncovered at the site. The prison was built by British contractors in the 1950s.
The prison held as many as 15,000 inmates in 2001. In 2002, Saddam Hussein's government began an expansion project to add six new cellblocks to the prison. In October 2002, he gave amnesty to most prisoners in Iraq. After the prisoners were released and the prison was left empty, it was looted. All of the documents relating to prisoners were piled and burnt inside of prison offices and cells, leading to extensive structural damage. Known mass-graves related to Abu Ghraib include: Khan Dhari, west of Baghdad - Mass grave with the bodies of political prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Fifteen victims were executed on 26 December 1998 and buried by prison authorities under the cover of darkness. Al-Zahedi, on the western outskirts of Baghdad - Secret graves near a civilian cemetery contain the remains of nearly 1,000 political prisoners. According to an eyewitness, 10 to 15 bodies arrived at a time from the Abu Ghraib prison and were buried by local civilians. An execution on 10 December 1999 in Abu Ghraib claimed the lives of 101 people in one day.
On 9 March 2000, 58 prisoners were killed at a time. The last corpse interred was number 993. From 2003 until August 2006, Abu Ghraib prison was used for detention purposes by both the U. S.-led coalition occupying Iraq and the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government has controlled the area of the facility known as "The Hard Site"; the prison was used to house only convicted criminals. Suspected criminals, insurgents or those arrested and awaiting trial were held at other facilities known as "camps" in U. S. military parlance. The U. S. housed all its detainees at "Camp Redemption", divided into five security levels. This camp built in the summer of 2004 replaced the three-level setup of Camp Ganci, Camp Vigilant and Abu Ghraib's Tier 1; the remainder of the facility was occupied by the U. S. military. Abu Ghraib served as both a detention facility; when the U. S. military was using the Abu Ghraib prison as a detention facility, it housed 7,490 prisoners there in March 2004. Population of detainees was much smaller, because Camp Redemption had a much smaller capacity than Camp Ganci had, many detainees have been sent from Abu Ghraib to Camp Bucca for this reason.
The U. S. military held all "persons of interest" in Camp Redemption. Some were suspected rebels, some suspected criminals; those convicted by trial in Iraqi court are transferred to the Iraqi-run Hard Site. In the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal, reserve soldiers from the 327th Military Police battalion were charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with prisoner abuse, beginning with an Army Criminal Investigation Division investigation on January 14, 2004. In April 2004, U. S. television news-magazine 60 Minutes reported on a story from the magazine The New Yorker, which recounted torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by U. S. contracted civilians. The story included photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners; the events created a substantial political scandal within the U. S. and other coalition countries. On April 20, 2004, insurgents fired 40 mortar rounds into the prison, killing 24 detainees and injuring 92. Commentators thought the attack was either an attempt to incite a riot or retribution for detainees' cooperating with the United States.
In May 2004, the U. S.-led coalition embarked on a prisoner-release policy to reduce numbers to fewer than 2,000. The U. S. military released nearly 1,000 detainees at the prison during the week ending August 27, 2005, at the request of the Iraqi government. In a May 24, 2004 address at the U. S. Army War College, President George W. Bush announced. On June 14 Iraqi interim President Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer said. S. military judge Col. James Pohl ruled the prison was a crime scene and could not be demolished until investigations and trials were completed. On April 2, 2005, the prison was attacked by more than 60 insurgents in the engagement known as the Battle of Abu Ghraib. In the two hours before being forced to retreat, the attackers suffered at least 50 casualties according to the U. S. military. Thirty-six persons at or in the prison, including U. S. military personnel and detainees, were injured in the attack. The attackers used small arms, RPGs as weapons, threw grenades over the walls. A suicide VBIED detonated just outside the front wall.
Officials believe that the car bomb was intended to breach the prison wall, enabling an assault and/or mass escape for detainees. Insurgents attacked military forces nearby on highways en route
