"I think he was killed. I honestly do. I think he was murdered"
Death Reconsidered
Was Col. Ted Westhusing's death in Iraq something more sinister than
suicide?
Robert Bryce | February 08, 2008
...........I talked to a source in the Department of Defense who met
Westhusing in Iraq about three months before his death. The source, who
asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, was investigating claims
of wrongdoing against military contractors working in Iraq. After a short
introduction, I asked him what he thought had happened to Westhusing. "I
think he was killed. I honestly do. I think he was murdered," the source
told me. "Maybe DOD didn't have enough evidence to call it murder, so they
called it suicide." I contacted the source through Larry C. Johnson, a
former employee of the CIA who specializes in terrorism and security
issues,
and who writes the "No Quarter USA" blog. Johnson and other bloggers have
written extensively about Westhusing's death.
.............................
Aside from his pedigree, Westhusing was also close to the seat of power.
When he was in Iraq, Westhusing worked for one of the most famous generals
in the U.S. military, David Petraeus, who at the time was head of the
Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. Petraeus has since gained
another star on his uniform (he now has four) and has become the commander
of all U.S. forces in Iraq.
..............................
Perhaps the most confounding element of the Westhusing story is the letter
that Westhusing wrote to Maj. Gen. Fil on May 28, 2005, officially
absolving
a key contractor of alleged wrongdoing. One of Westhusing's primary duties
was overseeing contractors from Virginia-based U.S. Investigations
Services,
a private security company with contracts worth $79 million to help train
Iraqi police units that were conducting special operations. (The owners of
USIS include the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm whose investors
formerly included former President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary
of
State James A. Baker III.) A few days before he penned the May 28 letter,
Westhusing had received an anonymous letter claiming USIS was cheating the
military, that several hundred weapons assigned to the counterterrorism
training program had disappeared, and that a number of radios, each
costing
$4,000, had vanished. The anonymous letter concluded that USIS was "not
providing what you are paying for" and that the entire training operation
was "a total failure."
........................
The note found next to his body, which his mother refuses to accept as a
suicide note, includes this line: "I didn't volunteer to sup****t corrupt,
money grubbing contractors ..."
............................
more at:
http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2682
The apparent suicide of Col. Ted Westhusing, as re****ted in the Los
Angeles
Times, resonates with loss, tragedy, and meaning. He was a professional
ethicist, specializing in the concept of a soldier's honor, who was
assigned
to supervise a civilian military contractor in Iraq. Col. Westhusing saw
everything he believed in trashed by civilian leader****p that understood
neither ethics nor honor, under a Republican government that disrespects
and
mistreats its military. Sound like a facile interpretation? Then listen to
the facts.
Westhusing, re****ts the Times, "was one of the Army's leading scholars of
military ethics ... His dissertation (for a Ph.D. in philosophy) was an
extended meditation on the meaning of honor." Once in Iraq, Westhusing
received an anonymous complaint that the contractor he oversaw, USIS, had
been cheating the government - and that it concealed gross human rights
violations to protect its contracts.
Writes the Times:
"In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one
conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty,
honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the
U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the
military."
But then, it comes from the top, doesn't it? Dick Cheney still holds that
infamous Halliburton stock, and the scandal-plague contractor still pays
him
a six-figure income. Halliburton employees have been found guilty of fraud
in Iraq, fraud investigations against the company itself are ongoing,
waste
and mismanagement are rampant -- and meanwhile Cheney challenges others
...
on ethics. Irony is not supposed to be a great soldier's strong suit.
Col. Westhusing's devotion to the military and its mission seemingly had
no
place in the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Pentagon. In fact, a military
psychologist
made his ethical stature and devotion to honor sound like a mental
disorder.
"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an
im****tant goal for people in the private sector was surprisingly limited,"
wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach, reducing a lifetime of integrity to a
clinical dysfunction. Shades of the USSR ...
And yet ... no wonder Lt. Col. Breitenbach saw Col. Westhusing's values as
a
medical condition. His commitment to completing the mission - to serving
the
country over making a profit -shows a notable detachment from the reality
that is today's Pentagon. Sen. Patrick Leahy's attempts to pass a law
preventing excess cor****ate war profiteering and fraud has been blocked by
Republicans for several years now - with the aid and sup****t of Sen.
McCain
and the other "mavericks" in the GOP.
....more...
Check out more here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/an-american-death-col-_b_11373.html
You see the November 22, 1963 assassination as the coup it was.
Once people recognize that fact, the events of today become clear
and
the continuum becomes obvious.
For example Halliburton, the mega war profiteers, started out as a
small company in Texas named Brown & Root, with one asset: significant
stock
in a very ambitious and unscrupulous politician named Lyndon Johnson. On
November 23, 1963 LBJ issued National Security Action Memorandum #273,
which
reversed President Kennedy's order within NSAM #263 which (in conjunction
with the McNamarra/Taylor re****t) ended the Vietnam "conflict" and ordered
all US personnel home. This hugely benefited LBJ's financial backers Brown
&
Root.
This was done less than 24 hours after President Kennedy was
murdered.
Clearly, it was the highest priority for the new "government."
"Johnson had symbiotic relation****p with Brown & Root occurred
before
campaign finance laws required candidates to reveal the sources of their
funding. Indeed, by Johnson's own admission, according to his biographer
Ronnie Dugger, much of the money he got from Brown & Root came in cash. In
return, Johnson steered lucrative federal contracts to the company. Those
contracts helped Brown & Root become a global construction powerhouse that
today employs 20,000 people and operates in more than 100 countries."
http://weeklywire.com/ww/08-28-00/austin_pols_feature2.html
"After Johnson took over the Oval Office, Brown & Root won contracts
for huge construction projects for the federal government. By the
mid-1960s,
newspaper columnists and the Republican minority in Congress began to
suggest that the company's good luck was tied to its sizable contributions
to Johnson's political campaign.
More questions were raised when a consortium of which Brown & Root
was
a part won a $380 million contract to build air****ts, bases, hospitals and
other facilities for the U.S. Navy in South Vietnam. By 1967, the General
Accounting Office had faulted the "Vietnam builders" -- as they were
known -- for massive accounting lapses and allowing thefts of materials.
Brown & Root also became a target for anti-war protesters: they
called
the firm the embodiment of the "military-industrial complex" and denounced
it for building detention cells to hold Viet Cong prisoners in South
Vietnam.
Today, Brown & Root is called Kellogg, Brown & Root -- a Halliburton
subsidiary better known as KBR."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1569483
Again, once people recognize the coup of 1963 for what it was, the
events of today become clear, and the continuum becomes obvious.
|
