More Than "A Few Rotten Apples"

Salon.Com

A U.S. soldier who killed an Iraqi general in custody got his wrist slapped. Yet his appalling sentence made a certain sense.

By Brig. Gen. David Irvine and David Danzig

Jan. 27, 2006 Earlier this week at Fort Carson in Colorado, the military jury that heard charges of murder against Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer delivered a bold and stunning version of justice -- a sentence amounting to a slap on the wrist. Welshofer was on trial for the death of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush: After Mowhoush's capture in western Iraq in November 2003, Welshofer, an experienced Army interrogator, bound him and stuffed him in a sleeping bag, and then sat on Mowhoush's chest in an effort to pry from him information about the Iraqi insurgency. The Iraqi general suffocated.

A jury trial always has three defendants: the accused, the prosecutor and the law. In this one, part of which we observed from the courtroom last week, the three captains, two majors and one lieutenant colonel on the jury spared the defendant, indicted the prosecutor, and found the law irrelevant.

A primary aspect of Welshofer's defense was the claim that Welshofer had been operating under confusing guidelines, and that his superiors had been aware of the "claustrophobic" interrogation technique he used. With a verdict of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty against Welshofer, the jury spared him from a more serious murder conviction and life in prison. Even the lesser verdict could have carried a three-year prison sentence. But the jury imposed a sentence that called only for a letter of reprimand, two months' confinement to post, and forfeiture of $6,000 in pay. In essence, the jury took revenge upon the prosecution for wasting a week of the jurors' time by bringing a charge that the jury, evidently, felt was not warranted under the circumstances of combat.

More: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/01/27/welshofer/