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01/23/2006:

"CIA Role a Mystery at Army Court-Martial"

FORT CARSON, Colo. -- The initials were spoken aloud only once all week, and then apparently by mistake. After this past week's testimony, any role the CIA had -- or didn't have -- in the interrogation of an Iraqi general who died in U.S. custody remains a tantalizing and mysterious backdrop to the court-martial of Army Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr.

The CIA is "the ghost at the banquet," said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert in military law who has been following the court-martial but doesn't know if the CIA was involved in the case.

"We're playing 'Hamlet' without Hamlet here," said Fidell, an attorney in private practice who teaches military law at American University in Washington. He also represented news organizations in their attempts to open pretrial hearings in Welshofer's prosecution.

Welshofer was convicted late Saturday of negligent homicide in the 2003 death of Republican Guard Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush at a detention camp in western Iraq.

He could be dishonorably discharged and sentenced to up to three years and three months in jail at a hearing Monday. If convicted of the original murder charge, he could have been sentenced to life in prison.

Prosecutors said Mowhoush was stuffed headfirst in a sleeping bag and bound with electrical cord, then suffocated with Welshofer sitting atop his chest.

The defense had argued a heart condition caused Mowhoush's death, and that Welshofer's commanders had approved the interrogation technique.

In 2004, the CIA said one of its officers may have been involved in Mowhoush's death, but the agency refused to elaborate. Last August, The Washington Post reported that documents it examined said Mowhoush was severely beaten by a CIA-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary group two days before he died.
newsday.com