"It's because he believed in duty, honor, country that he's dead."

Slowly, the facts behind Col. Westhusing's suicide begin to surface.

In 11/05, Huffington Post:

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.

And here:

Westhusing began having increasingly contentious conflicts with the contractors from USIS. There were ongoing problems with USIS's expenses, and Westhusing was forced to deal with allegations that USIS had seen or participated in the killing of Iraqis. He received an anonymous letter claiming USIS was cheating the military at every opportunity, that several hundred weapons assigned to the counterterrorism training program had disappeared, and that a number of radios, each of which cost $4,000, had also disappeared. The letter concluded that USIS was "not providing what you are paying for" and that the entire training operation was "a total failure."

Westhusing was devastated. Even if the charges were accurate, there was little that could be done. Iraq had no functioning judicial system, and there were questions about jurisdiction in case the contractors were indicted. Westhusing wrote to his family, telling them about the problems with the contractors, and said he needed to talk to a lawyer about the issues he was handling.

Jurassicpork of Welcome to Pottersville:

Just after Westhusing’s body was found, both Petraeus and Fils were suddenly reassigned as far away from Westhusing’s corpse as possible. In fact, Petraeus was sent to Fort Leavenworth and Fils to Fort Hood. And while unlikely is the idea of Westhusing turning gumshoe and uncovering evidence linking USIS (a Carlyle Group-owned security contractor supplementing US forces) and Iran-Contra, we do know that Westhusing was personally and professionally anguished over what he saw as military indifference to the rampant corruption and abominable abuses that he’d seen and heard committed against the Iraqi people by these very same US Investigations Services mercenaries.

Westhusing was one of the nation’s leading military ethicists. How did they reasonably expect him to react when forced to witness such barbaric behavior?

He went through all the proper channels like a good soldier and was patted on the head and told that it would be taken care of. However, after a vaudeville impression of an investigation, the Army determined that there had been “no contractual violations” on the part of USIS. In the beginning, Westhusing had nothing to go on but an anonymous four page letter but you have to consider that Westhusing’s mood became ever-darkening after some digging on his own confirmed the letter’s charges.

In his suicide note, Westhusing was said to have named both Petraeus and Fils and had charged them with enabling these abuses by simply looking the other way. At the very least, that would explain the abrupt stateside reassignments of both generals.

I hope Petraeus and Fils are haunted by Westhusing's ghost, and feel his sorrowful outrage whenever they think of their actions in Iraq.