Monday, October 22, 2007

Linkage Between War Profiteering and Non-combat Deaths

From CLG News:

Suicide Is Not Painless By Frank Rich 21 Oct 2007 The $26,788 [Charles D. Riechers, who 'committed suicide' in October] received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit.

So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone...

There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005...

Colonel Westhusing’s death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book "Blood Money." [A must read]

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