Fort Carson – Fighting back tears, an Army interrogator convicted of killing an Iraqi general by stuffing him headfirst into a sleeping bag and sitting on his chest apologized today and asked the military jury not to separate him from his wife and children by sending him to prison.
“I deeply apologize if my actions tarnished the soldiers serving in Iraq,” Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr. said at his sentencing hearing.
Welshofer, 43, was convicted Saturday of negligent homicide and negligent dereliction of duty. Prosecutors said he put a sleeping bag over the head of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, sat on his chest and used his hand to cover the general’s mouth while questioning him at a detention camp in Iraq in 2003.
Prosecutors said the general suffocated.
The jury of six Army officers was to begin deliberating the sentence later today. Welshofer faced up to three years and three months in prison, a dishonorable discharge and loss of his pension.
When he finished his testimony, Welshofer mouthed, “I love you” to his wife, Barbara.
She testified earlier that she was worried about providing for their three children if her husband went to prison, but she said she was proud of him for contesting the case.
“I love him more for fighting this,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “He’s always said that you need to do the right thing, and sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do.” Earlier, Lt. Col. Paul Calvert, testifying on Welshofer’s behalf, said attacks by Iraqi insurgents around the western Iraqi city of al Qaim, the area where Mowhoush was taken into custody, “went to practically none” after Mowhoush died.
Prosecutor Maj. Tiernan Dolan did not question the assertion but suggested Mowhoush’s death probably denied coalition forces valuable information. Dolan did not call any witnesses at the sentencing hearing.
Welshofer acquitted of murder, a charge that could have brought a life sentence.
The defense had argued a heart condition caused Mowhoush’s death, and that Welshofer’s commanders had approved the interrogation technique.
Prosecutors described Welshofer as a rogue interrogator who became frustrated with Mowhoush’s refusal to answer questions and escalated his techniques from simple interviews to beatings to simulating drowning, and finally, to death.
