No Penalties

Soldiers prosecuted in the abuse, even deaths of detainees rarely pay a heavy price, and a report to be released by Human Rights First has found that service members were disciplined in 12 of the 33 cases where detainees' deaths were ruled homicides. Often the discipline was relatively mild, as was the case for Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr.

Charged with murder of an Iraqi general during an interrogation session, Welshofer was convicted last week of lesser offenses. On Monday, an Army jury at Ft. Carson, Colo., ruled that instead of serving jail time and being forced from the military, Welshofer would receive a formal reprimand, forfeit $6,000 of his salary and spend 60 days restricted to his home, office, and church. During a Tuesday conference call arranged by Human Rights First, the dead Iraqi general's son, Mohammed Mowhoush, said Welshofer's sentence was too light. "This judgment is not fair," he said. "This man, Lewis Welshofer, killed someone and he must be punished more harder than that."

Last year, a jury acquitted a Navy SEAL in the beating of an Iraqi detainee who later died in CIA custody. And of 15 soldiers serving in Afghanistan whom the Army has disciplined for abuse at a jail where two detainees died, three were acquitted and none has received more than five months' jail time.

There is no complete independent tracking of military abuse prosecutions. But observers say the stiffest sentence appears to have gone to Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr., convicted of torturing but not killing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He is serving 10 years in a military prison. "It's telling that the person who got the most time was the one all over television," said Jumana Musa, an official with Amnesty International. "The less in the news, the lighter the sentence seems to be."

In Washington, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said Welshofer's sentence did not indicate that the US was lax about punishing its own. In a stunning statement dripping with hypocrisy he said "When there is wrongdoing or abuse, people are held to account, and we have seen that time and time again," McClellan told reporters. "This country holds people to account if they don't follow the law - if they don't follow the rules that are in place."

McClellan should be careful with his statements, he might be helping to send Chimpie to jail. Why should the low ranking soldiers receive a harsh penalty anyways? The real perpetrators for these crimes are the ones who instituted the policies. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Gonzales, Libby, Addington – they deserve to jailed.
Posted on The Human Stain