I joined the 800th MP Brigade when they were already deployed.

There was a military police brigade with over 3,400 soldiers getting ready to go home because their mission - prisoner-of-war operations - was finished.

The mission statement was ordered, and it sent the 800th MP Brigade, effective the first of July, up to Baghdad. I joined my brigade to take command at the end of June.

After they killed Uday and Qusay, the focus centered on Saddam: Find him, kill him, capture him, whatever it takes. To me, it was a false sense of security: If we get Saddam, we're going to win this war.

I was ordered not to go out to Abu Ghraib after dark early on, because Abu Ghraib was extremely dangerous.

I knew how many MPs I had assigned to the brigade, how many military prison operations I would be running, but we needed to evaluate how many criminal prison operations we could support.

Shortly after we arrived in Baghdad, we had another conversation with the ambassador. He said that he wanted us to give him the timeline, because we had 90 days to get these prisons operational and transfer responsibility back to the Iraqis.

If you are charged with this responsibility of enhancing interrogations, or using soldiers to enhance interrogations to find Saddam, and you're above the law for all practical purposes, you might try some unusual techniques. Now we know that, in fact, they did.

In November, they transferred control of Abu Ghraib to the military intelligence command completely; it was, after all, the center for interrogations for Iraq.

That policy was abandoned very quickly, and the military police were tagged with the responsibility of conducting training, which they did. We were not equipped or set up with personnel to recruit new Iraqi guards.

The war was declared over - the end of major combat operations - in May 2003. Release procedures got under way immediately; reducing the population from 8,000 to just over 300, of course, requires fewer military police soldiers.

At that time, about July 5, we had no Iraqi corrections officers working for us. It was a responsibility of the CPA, with contractors, to set up a training program.

Military intelligence interrogators, however, their goal is to get information, to save lives, to stop the war, to find Saddam - whatever the information is going to be used for, at whatever cost.

They transfer the prison, and all of a sudden all this money cuts loose, all these people cut loose.

And shortly after that, when I try to get access to those soldiers, to ask them what in the world was going on, I was told that they did not work for me and I had no right to have access to any one of them.

We need to fix this. It hasn't been done yet because there's still a reluctance to admit that there was even a problem - anywhere above seven rogue soldiers who got out of control on the night shift.

It's hard to be happy when you are facing 120 to 140 degree temperatures and nothing seems to be moving in a direction that you think or they think or you've been told it's supposed to be moving in.

If they conducted a raid in this room, you'd all be policed up. They'd take all of you to Abu Ghraib and turn you over to the soldiers. Maybe there's only one or two of you in this group who was a known associate or had any piece of information that they are trying to exploit.

The day after the prison was transferred to the military intelligence command, they had an entire battalion - 1,200, 1,500 soldiers - arrive at Abu Ghraib just for force protection alone.

I thought that that mission and the mission of taking care of those soldiers were my priorities, and I stand by the same today. There wasn't a lot of support for those soldiers.

Military police know what to do, they know the Geneva Conventions, and their objective is to provide a safe, secure, fair environment for prisoners under their control.

I joined the 800th MP Brigade when they were already deployed.

The vast majority of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, even after interrogation, had no further intel value whatsoever.

I had 16 other prisons that I needed to pay attention to, and we did. And I had 3,400 soldiers who were depending on me to take care of them, and I did.

I like films that rest in the memory, so I try and choose parts which have some kind of social or emotional force.

Popularity is glory's small change.

Anyone in the arts has had an experience of seeing someone who they related to doing something and thinking, 'I could do that.' If you have one generation where you force its hand a bit, then the next one fills in the gaps, because it's seen an example of what can be done.

My advice to kids is give it your all! Give it 110 percent and don't give up!

There was a time when all that mattered was that you were in a good movie.

People do see me as sweet and innocent. Not to say that I am not those things. But I have other sides to me.

We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate.

I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.

The keyboard is my whole life. My life is centered around either sitting at my keyboard or driving my car. Those are the two most important things, more than anything else. Being at my keyboard, it's the happiest time for me.

Western Christians have imagined that, at the end of the day, God is going to throw the present space-time universe into a trashcan and we'll be sitting on clouds playing harps. The ultimate future that we're promised is much more interesting than that. It's new heavens and a new Earth with new bodies to live in.

I think the world has their own good, clean, Christian comedy. They don't need my help.

Mystery makes movie stars! If you see someone on the cover of the weeklies all the time, why would you want to pay to see them in a movie?

I can teach many sports, but obviously, tennis is the one. When you do other sports, you see things from different perspectives: different footwork drills, body positions, angles and geometry. All that stuff is helpful, and so when I do other sports, I can see things, because once you know one sport, then the other sport becomes more clear.

To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.

In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it's disruptive and it's a problem.

I tend to hide behind my status of being a diva; it's easy for me to embrace that part of me and seek confidence by being a bit outrageous at times.

First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.

Something that has so much power must have life. Instruments have life.

Some say that Jesus is the rock, or the anchor. I say that your friends and family are your anchor. And you can really hold their hands, not just sing about it. No disrespect to George Jones.

I wanted to be as comfortable in that environment as she was. I moved around those areas in character.

Fashion and music have always played off each other and certainly do for me; I love both so much. But there are definitely those moments when you're playing the right song at the right time in the right place, and it feels like the best job in the world.

When I look at my daughter, who's 24, she is much more confident than I ever was and her expectations are higher. But I worry that there is a backlash brewing against progress on equality.

'I Am Number Four' definitely borrows from a whole bunch of genres and has a whole bunch of different themes throughout. And I think if it was just one stale two-dimensional thing then it would be kind of boring. And I think they did a fantastic job.

The stories that engaged me as a kid were all science fiction. Later, it turned out that I didn't have the language to talk about what was bothering me in a way that was straightforward.