Frank, are you aware that the formal name of Abu Ghraib Prison is "Baghdad Central Confinement Facility"? It's not on another planet, it's not even a remote outpost, it's at the heart of the system occupying Iraq and an integral part of it. You might find it politically expedient to try and call it a system unto itself, isolated from contact and supervision of the greater system, but you know that won't wash. It's all one interconnected system that scales upward: Just as Karpinski's poor leadership allowed individual soldiers to run amok, her superiors are culpable in allowing her to get away with it...and their superiors, on up the chain of command, to its pinnacle. "The buck stops here" isn't just an expression of a moral value, it's also a statement of logic--where else can the buck stop?

I'll bet you haven't read General Taguba's report. He seems to have understood that his mission to look for systemic problems meant judging Abu Ghraib in context. He discusses poor training of units before they arrived, and poor morale, and lack of resources and organization. He notes ambiguous and poorly-thought-out orders. He notes that overcrowding in other facilities caused civilian Iraqi criminals (what he calls "Iraqi-on-Iraqi" crime) to be sent to Abu Ghraib and mixed with prisoners of interest purely to the military and to intelligence. Karpinski didn't request those prisoners be transferred, and that's part of the context in which she operated. Many elements of the system failed, both inside and outside the prison.

You might try applying the same rigor to examining this systemic failure as was applied to the Columbia failure. The thermal tiles didn't fall off the orbiter on their own, any more than Karpinski took off on her own. Both incidents happened in the context of, and as a result of, the failure of the overall system.