“I think he was killed. I honestly do. I think he was murdered"

[Crazy Horse]

The kaput primitive..............raising the price of tin foil on an hourly basis

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2840863

kpete  (1000+ posts)       Sat Feb-09-08 08:07 PM
Original message
“I think he was killed. I honestly do. I think he was murdered" 
 Advertisements [?]Edited on Sat Feb-09-08 08:09 PM by kpete
A 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 support corrupt, money grubbing contractors ...”
...........................
more at:
http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2682

 
let's feel some troop love and in general BDS

MasonJar  (1000+ posts)      Sat Feb-09-08 08:11 PM
Response to Original message
1. His death stinks to high heaven. I hope there is a hell for these evil doers to spend eternity in.

 

Disturbed  (1000+ posts)       Sat Feb-09-08 08:49 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. I am certain that the DOD will not investigate this man's death
 any further.

 

UpInArms  (1000+ posts)       Sat Feb-09-08 08:47 PM
Response to Original message
2. background - with imbedded links worth reading here: 
 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/an-american-deat...

The apparent suicide of Col. Ted Westhusing, as reported 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 leadership 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, reports 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 important 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 corporate war profiteering and fraud has been blocked by Republicans for several years now - with the aid and support of Sen. McCain and the other "mavericks" in the GOP.

...more...

 

defendandprotect  (1000+ posts)      Sun Feb-10-08 12:11 PM
Response to Reply #2
12. American government has been ruined by political violence and theft
 Edited on Sun Feb-10-08 12:12 PM by defendandprotect
ofelections that have occurred -- openly -- over the past 50 years and more ---

JFK 1963 --

and electronic voting machines began to be used in the mid-1960's . . .

Watergate ---

and heaven only knows how many political murders ---

These military "suicides" have also been going on for decades ---
seemingly to do also with drug smuggling/involvement in the military.

 

rosetta627 (101 posts)      Sun Feb-10-08 01:53 PM
Response to Reply #12
15. You certainly have good vision defendandprotect
 Edited on Sun Feb-10-08 01:54 PM by rosetta627
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 report) 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 relationship 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....

"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 airports, 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=15...

Again, once people recognize the coup of 1963 for what it was, the events of today become clear, and the continuum becomes obvious.

what idjits 

Octafish  (1000+ posts)       Sun Feb-10-08 02:01 PM
Response to Reply #15
16. A most hearty welcome to DU, rosetta627! 
 You are spot-on regarding 22 November 1963.

If DU may add a bit more on the subject:

Poppy Bush brought up JFK Assassination and "Conspiracy Theorists" at Ford Funeral

The memos are particularly interesting.

rosetta627 (101 posts)      Sun Feb-10-08 02:11 PM
Response to Reply #16
18. Oh Octafish, there is no one I'd rather be welcomed by
 You are no stranger to me.
I've read your posts for years.
Thank you for carrying the torch.

When Poppy Bush used the occasion of (Warren Omission member) Ford's funeral to attack us, it underscored the ongoing importance of understanding what really occurred on November 22, 1963, and how directly it relates to today.

I'll go read the memos at your link now.
Thanks again my friend.

wolfgangmo (31 posts)      Sun Feb-10-08 03:47 PM
Response to Reply #12
19. And let's not forget ... 
 ... the completely suspicious death of Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota - a true populist maverick. He is missed in the north woods, I can tell you.

 

Octafish  (1000+ posts)       Sat Feb-09-08 09:21 PM
Response to Original message
5. Know your BFEE: They kill good soldiers like Col. Ted Westhusing for profit...   

Know your BFEE: They kill good soldiers like Col. Ted Westhusing for profit...

Almost a thousand members of America's armed forces have died since Col. Westhusing.

We don't have a number of Iraqi civilians killed as Bush's Pentagon won't report on the human toll they call "collateral damage."

Holy hell

Imagevision (1000+ posts)     Sun Feb-10-08 02:18 AM
Response to Original message
9. Can't begin to fathom the wheeling & dealing going on over there, they misplaced 9 billion in cash a
 couple of years ago and the M$M looked the other way on that story as well. Iraq the greatest cash cow on the planet as americans get booted from their houses and screwed buying gas to get to work...

jazzjunkysue  (1000+ posts)     Sun Feb-10-08 11:55 AM
Response to Original message
11. Alot of people get suicided in the Bush/Nixon administrations.
 There's just too many statistically to be feasible.

nothing but idjits

[Lord Undies]

I haven't read the DU thread.  Did they mention the rash of suicides that happened right before, during, and right after the Clinton Administration?  I believe there was over 100 "suicides".  Some of them were bullets to the back of the head.   I think one guy beat himself to death with a hammer.


******************************************************************************************************

If Westhusing had been killed by a terrorist bomber, the DUmp would be giddy with glee. 

[DumbAss Tanker]

I guess I must be alone in seeing a body found with a note condemning vile corrupt contractors just wee tad inconsistent with having been murdered by vile corrupt contractors.

[Crazy Horse]

I guess I must be alone in seeing a body found with a note condemning vile corrupt contractors just wee tad inconsistent with having been murdered by vile corrupt contractors.

Readjust the foil, you must be getting common sense wave interference

[DumbAss Tanker]

I guess I must be alone in seeing a body found with a note condemning vile corrupt contractors just wee tad inconsistent with having been murdered by vile corrupt contractors.

Readjust the foil, you must be getting common sense wave interference

*Squidge-squidge*  All better now:
"Chimpie McBushitler you murderous bastard!!!111!!!"

 

[TheSarge]

Hmmm...I wonder if the DUmmies used this much tin foil or cared this much when Adm Boorda died?

[Airwolf]

Hmmm...I wonder if the DUmmies used this much tin foil or cared this much when Adm Boorda died?

Hmmmm Nope not one tear for him. Now If it had been Jesse Macbeth or the traitorous asshat LT up in Ft. Lewis they would have practically killed each other to praise them.

[djones520]

I'm getting so sick and tired about their fake "Compassion" for the US Military.  These people wouldn't have given half a shit about this story if it wasn't something they could use as a tool against the boogey-bush.

[Crazy Horse]

Hmmm...I wonder if the DUmmies used this much tin foil or cared this much when Adm Boorda died?

I remember that day..........spoken over the 1MC.