Suicide Is Not Painless-By: Frank Rich

[kpete]

Op-Ed Columnist
Suicide Is Not Painless

By FRANK RICH
Published: October 21, 2007

IT was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages. Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage.

Mr. Riechers’s suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance in a front-page exposé in The Washington Post. The Post reported that the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Mr. Riechers, a decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: “I really didn’t do anything for C.R.I. I got a paycheck from them.” The question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors in return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January.

Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he 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. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle.

Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq. Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of government contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have enabled us to secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure, from electricity to hospitals. You can also see just why the heretofore press-shy Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater USA, staged a rapid-fire media blitz a week ago, sitting down with Charlie Rose, Lara Logan, Lisa Myers and Wolf Blitzer.



more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/opinion/21rich.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[Tatiana]

1. This is a MUST READ chilling piece that really connects the dots.

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.” Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil, is as much an epitaph for America’s engagement in Iraq as a suicide note.

“I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,” Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. “I am sullied.”

So the question in my mind is did Prince's Blackwater outfit murder Col. Westhusing? Waxman has so many investigations going on that he really needs some additional staffers. How dysfunctional have we become that we are relying on one man (Waxman) through one (Oversight) committee to investigate the multitude of corruption scandals rampant throughout this administration? Where is the Department of Justice? Oh that's right -- another decimated government office.

Wake me when this nightmare is over.

[kpete]

3. I thought so too

very good connecting of dots by Rich

[liberal N proud]

2. Killed himself?

[Tatiana]

4. Kick n/t

[Cha]

5. Suicide certainly wasn't painless

for Jim Hatfield and Dr David Kelly. The washed post does an expose on Charles D. Riechers but not on paul bremer?

I'm suspicious of ALL suicides connected to politics.

[malaise]

6. I'm so glad he went public with this

Suicide my ass.

[Richard Steele]

7. K&R