Why did they know they were going to need dog leashes when they were sent to Iraq?

Janis Karpinski will be spilling some beans on Nightline tonight

Janis Karpinski, the former Army Reserve brigadier general who was in charge of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, maintains she and other reservists have been unfairly scapegoated for the prisoner abuse scandal that shocked the world last year, and that the mistreatment of detainees may still be occurring.

"All the way up to the top of the Pentagon, they have a long-standing mindset about reservists and National Guard soldiers, and we are considered disposable," Karpinski said in an exclusive interview with ABC News' "Nightline." "We go back to our lives as civilians once we're released from active duty." [except, of course, for the lowest ranking scapegoats, who will go to jail to keep Donald Rumsfeld free, she didn't add.]

In the excerpts on the 6:30 news tonight she made it clear that she felt the orders -- and the details of the torture techniques -- did not come from the MPs, and that the general above her (Major General Jeff Miller) definitely knew about it. Of course he did, but she brought up an obvious point that I had not heard before. Do we really believe that these National Guardians and Reservists had the foresight to bring dog collars and leashes to Iraq? And if not, where did they come from? And was Lynndie England really just participating in a training video for future guards and torturers?

This may not be the issue here that it is in the rest of the world, but on the French news (at 7 on channel 25 in NYC -- I watched a lot of TV tonight) they made it clear that the anti-American riots going on in Afghanistan right now (protestors burning the stars'n'stripes being shot and killed on the streets by pro-US police) are the direct result of a Newsweek story in which the desecration of Korans in Guantanamo was described. We ignore our government's abuses and crimes at our own peril, if we ever want to travel freely and proudly through the world again.

Anyway, ex-General Karpinski looks like a woman scorned. It looks like she's going to pull no punches tonight now that she's out of uniform. I hope it's a big story tomorrow (along, of course, with the unexpected defeat of that chief defender of Guantanamo Kangaroo Courts, Captain Kangaroo Bolton - - a boy can hope, can't he?).

-T.B.L.