Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, suspended over allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, has apparently decided on a tactic to deflect attention away from herself—blame it on the Jews. (Hat tip: AG in Houston.)

The American general formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib prison says she has evidence Israelis were involved in interrogating Iraqi detainees at another facility.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was suspended in May over allegations of prisoner abuse, said she met a man claiming to be Israeli during a visit to a Baghdad intelligence center with a senior coalition general.

“I saw an individual there that I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet before, and I asked him what did he do there, was he an interpreter - he was clearly from the Middle East,” Karpinski told British Broadcasting Corp. radio in an interview broadcast Saturday. “He said, ‘Well I do some of the interrogation here. I speak Arabic but I’m not an Arab; I’m from Israel.’

“I was really kind of surprised by that … He didn’t elaborate any more than to say he was working with them and there were people from lots of different places that were involved in the operation,” Karpinski added.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry told the BBC that reports of Israeli troops or interrogators in Iraq were “completely untrue.” Israeli officials could not immediately be reached by The Associated Press.

The presence of Israeli forces in Iraq would inflame opinion in the Muslim world, where many compare the abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces to Israel’s treatment of Palestinian detainees.

And this woman told her outrageous story to none other than the Jew-hating BBC, who will now trumpet it to the Arab world to “inflame opinion” exactly as the article describes. This is amazingly low behavior from a high-ranking US official.

UPDATE: Surprise! Al-Reuters is jumping all over this story: U.S. General Says Met Israeli Interrogator in Iraq.

LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. general who was in charge of Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison said on Saturday she had met an Israeli interrogator in Iraq, a claim Israel denied but which was likely to irritate many in the Arab world …

… with the gleeful assistance of Western news media.