War & Peace Quote by Janis Karpinski

Karpinski’s sentence tries to do two jobs at once: sanitize an ugly practice while admitting, almost accidentally, that it can’t be sanitized. The opening phrase, "Military intelligence interrogators, however", sets up a corrective, as if she’s pushing back against a simplistic public narrative. Then she piles up motives in a breathless stack - "get information, to save lives, to stop the war, to find Saddam" - a familiar post-9/11 moral ladder where every rung climbs toward necessity. It’s not elegant rhetoric; it’s the rhetoric of institutional self-protection, the kind that borrows urgency to outrun scrutiny.

The subtext lives in the pivot: "whatever the information is going to be used for, at whatever cost". That last clause is doing the real work, and it’s chilling because it’s both justification and confession. "Whatever" erases oversight. It suggests a system where the end use of intelligence is irrelevant as long as the machine keeps running, and where human costs - detainees, due process, moral credibility - are treated as adjustable variables.

Context matters: Karpinski is inseparable from Abu Ghraib, a scandal defined by the gap between stated goals and actual behavior. Her framing leans into the post-invasion obsession with Saddam and the promise of intelligence as a war-stopper, a claim that, with hindsight, reads less like strategy than like wishful thinking weaponized. The quote captures how democracies talk themselves into brutality: not through sadism, but through a bureaucratic certainty that "saving lives" can launder almost anything.