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"I Am Sullied": Suicide Before Dishonor in Occupied Iraq

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Home » Discuss » Archives » General Discussion: Presidential (Through Nov 2009)

IChing

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Thu Dec-08-05 01:01 AM
Original message

"I Am Sullied": Suicide Before Dishonor in Occupied Iraq

"I Am Sullied": Suicide Before Dishonor in Occupied Iraq

Gary Leupp | December 7 2005

"I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse, and liars. I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more."

Having written a last note, and placed it by his bed in his trailer on a U.S. military base near Baghdad, on the afternoon of June 5, 2005 Colonel Ted S. Westhusing put his 9-mm. service pistol to his head and blew his brains out. He was 44, survived by a wife and three young children.

Quite a number of U.S. troops have committed suicide in Iraq, or upon return home. According to the Washington Times, 24 soldiers' deaths in Iraq were ruled suicides in 2003, nine in 2004. But the Washington Post reports that "Thirty-one Marines committed suicide in 2004, all of them enlisted men, not commissioned officers. The majority were younger than 25 and took their lives with gunshot wounds, according to Marine statistics."
>>>>snip

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2005/071205suicide.htm

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madrchsod

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Thu Dec-08-05 01:05 AM
Response to Original message

1. there maybe another one

Edited on Thu Dec-08-05 01:06 AM by madrchsod

i`m still tracking down if it`s true or not..i trust my source but i still don`t have a confirmation. i`m sure their are more across this country that are not being reported as suicides and are kept private by everyone involved

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IChing

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Thu Dec-08-05 01:13 AM
Response to Reply #1

2. 31 marines have been indentified in 2004 alone.

So I imagine more for 2005, in Vietnam we saw quite a number of suicides.

Horrible, tragic and painful for their families and this nation.

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Nothing Without Hope

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Thu Dec-08-05 01:15 AM
Response to Original message

3. I heard about this on NPR yesterday (Tuesday) - quite a long report.

Edited on Thu Dec-08-05 01:19 AM by Nothing Without Hope

And it's not PROVEN that it is a suicide - could be another silenced potential whistleblower, since he was appalled by the greedy, corrupt contractors. The NPR report said that his family is divided on whether to believe the suicide story.

Tragic, by any measure, whatever happened. He was a good, honest, caring man.

He was not some young recruit - he was 44 years old, a respected teacher at West Point with a lifetime concern about the ethics of soldiers. (This is from memory and may be slightly inaccurate.) It's important to realize the significance of this story. He went to Iraq so that he could better understand and better teach his military students. He was assigned to a task involving contractors, and he was totally shocked at the corruption and greed and lack of concern about the welfare of the people presumably being served.

Did he suicide or was he killed to shut him up? Either way, his story is deeply tragic and emblematic of what this war does to good people.

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tirechewer

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Thu Dec-08-05 01:31 AM
Response to Reply #3

4. You're right about the ambiguity...

This was a very ambiguous situation. The Army ruled the death a suicide. The Army authenticated the handwriting in the letter they say he left, and they prepared a savage psychiatric report afterwords to support their conclusion of suicide. They basically said in their report that he had killed himself but it was his own fault.

He had knowledge and had complained about a private contractor after he received an anonymous letter alleging that the contractor was charging the military for services they had never provided, and that the contractor had been involved in two instances where Iraqi civilians had been murdered.

Here is the link to the blog where I read about it, which in turn links to a very detailed article in the LA Times, if you'd like to read about it in more detail.

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2005/11/when-honor-is-no-longer-possible.html

You're right about his life being a tragic loss too. By all accounts he was a man who cared deeply about right and wrong and living his life in an honorable way was one of the main things which drove him.

This is a very shades of gray situation. I left the information not sure what happened to him either.

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Nothing Without Hope

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Thu Dec-08-05 01:35 AM
Response to Reply #4

6. thank you for this information. Given the history of military reporting

Edited on Thu Dec-08-05 01:39 AM by Nothing Without Hope

from Iraq and the dangerous (to the contractors and to the Bushies) information he had and would have exposed, I tend to believe his death was murder. He was no young, inexperienced recruit, but a well-known, mature, respected career officer - he would have made a davastating, convincing witness against the criminals. Also, I think a man so driven to do the ethical thing, even if it caused him discomfort and stress, would not have abandoned his family and "taken the easy way out" when faced by the criminal acts that he was witnessing. After all, once he is dead, he can accomplish nothing; suicide in this situation is generally seen as a cowardly act, and he was no coward. Then too, he was found not at the place where he was living but in the contractors' area. That seems very unlikely.

More likely by far is that he came to confront them and threaten to expose them and they killed him for it.

But at least for now, there's no way to be sure.

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tirechewer

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Thu Dec-08-05 02:01 AM
Response to Reply #6

8. You're welcome..

One thing the blogger mentioned was that Colonel Westhusing was also a devout Catholic and that neither his friends nor family thought that he was capable of killing himself. They thought of him as invincible and able to withstand anything.

I'm still not sure though, because even the strongest people have a breaking point and if the stress is bad enough, they will reach it.

This is going to be one of those things that raises questions that can never be answered completely. I don't believe what the government says. I don't believe what the Army says, because in this situation they have the most to lose. But no one will ever know for sure.

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Nothing Without Hope

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Thu Dec-08-05 02:07 AM
Response to Reply #8

9. Devout Catholic, eh? In that faith, suicide is a mortal sin, i.e., a

Edited on Thu Dec-08-05 02:16 AM by Nothing Without Hope

one-way ticket to Hell for eternity. He was no coward, and he was fighting for a cause - I cannot believe he would have killed himself. Now I'm more convinced than ever - this is a coverup of a murder.

It used to be - and may still be, I haven't checked - that suicides could not even be buried with their family members in the Church cemetary - they had to be buried outside consecrated ground, as if they were evil and separated even in death from their families and the Church.

Oh, no. I really don't believe he committed suicide. I think the reason he was in the contractors' area the night he died was to confront them and threaten them with exposure. Their response was to kill him and try to cover it up as a suicide. Knowing his history as a famous philosopher of military ethics, his "suicide note" would be easy to compose.

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tirechewer

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Thu Dec-08-05 11:18 PM
Response to Reply #9

10. I checked this for you...

I'm not a catholic, and I was curious too, so I checked it out. I found this link.

http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Mar2001/Wiseman.asp#F3

Click on the blue box where the link asks if a Catholic who committed suicide can have a funeral mass or not. It explains it much better than I could. Apparently suicide itself is no longer always a mortal sin, they take a more conditional approach to it which the same article details. It was quite interesting.

I also found a website which attempts to hold private contractors in war zones accountable for their actions. I found it very interesting. It is a report on the things like the that Colonel Westhusing became aware of. Here's the link, if you want to take a look at it. The Aegis video is no longer down loadable from there, but it is nothing I ever wanted to see myself. I don't have it in me to watch people die like that.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12829

I'm still not sure about the Colonel, but it was interesting reading. I have not yet heard of one successful government privatizing program, but this is the worst thing I have ever seen. Some of these private contractors act like hunting and killing Iraqi civilians is "sport", like killing animals is a sport for some people.

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Nothing Without Hope

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Fri Dec-09-05 02:26 AM
Response to Reply #10

12. Thank you for your research. I'm bookmarking this and will come back

when I have a bit of time to pore over the information. I'm glad to hear that the Catholic Church is more conditional these days about declaring suicides condemned to eternal damnation. I still strongly doubt that this man killed himself. Regardless of whether it would fit his character,it seems to me, the people he would expose would have a stronger motive.

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tirechewer

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Fri Dec-09-05 03:08 AM
Response to Reply #12

13. You're welcome...

For what it's worth too, when I was trying to locate the Franciscan link which gave the suicide information, I saw a study that said that even when it was an absolute prohibition for Catholics to commit suicide, their statistics for attempts and completion were no lower than that of non Catholic people.

After I read the website about oversight of contractors, I am leaning more toward your conclusion, and that was another reason I gave you the link.

Three of Bush's security contractors in Iraq are accused of killing Iraqi civilians without provocation. These are Aegis, USIS, and Triple Canopy. Also the notorious Blackwater and more and more coming under scrutiny. Here is a link to an article from the Washington Post I found later. Check it out when you get the time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/03/AR2005120300881.html

This is unfolding as a huge, huge scandal that Rumsfeld and Bush are desperate to cover up. They have not been able to do so, but at the time the Colonel died, they must have wanted to very badly.

Blackwater is also providing "security" for what is left of the city of New Orleans. I have seen photographs and they were discussed several times by groups like Veterans for Peace, who have been providing the only only consistent help to the hurricane survivors along the Gulf Coast. What Bush hopes to accomplish by doing this I can't even imagine.

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Nothing Without Hope

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Fri Dec-09-05 03:24 AM
Response to Reply #13

14. Bush wants an excuse for martial law:

I've given links to threads with documentation in this post within a recent thread on the documents released by Blanco:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5518358&mesg_id=5526430
post title (12/6): Reply 23. This fleshes out what we heard about the WH trying to force martial law

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tirechewer

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Fri Dec-09-05 04:26 AM
Response to Reply #14

16. He's already got it...

From what the volunteer groups are saying he already has it. New Orleans is full of National Guard who patrol and stand guard. Blacktower is there. Here is yet another link. This is to the blog of the volunteers who are going to New Orleans for Code Pink. Again, when you have the time give it a scan.

http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=547

From the words they are writing and the pictures they are taking, the city is under Federal Martial Law in fact, if not officially. Especially in the 9th ward.

There have been similar descriptions the military force in the city by other volunteer groups. This is just the most recent one I have read.

Now I promise I'll desist in giving you links. I'm beginning to feel like the evil link genie.:yoiks:

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Nothing Without Hope

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Fri Dec-09-05 04:31 AM
Response to Reply #16

17. Thank you for ALL your links. I'm one that saves thousands of bookmarks

and I think that the progressive power grab by the Bush Administration is one of the most important topics there is. As is the aftermath of the hurricanes - I have hundreds of bookmarks on that topic too and am always glad of new good ones. No worry about evil link genies from me!

:toast:

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tirechewer

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Fri Dec-09-05 11:55 PM
Response to Reply #17

18. You're welcome

I will continue to trail links, then for all and sundry.:toast:

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Nothing Without Hope

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Fri Dec-09-05 03:30 AM
Response to Reply #13

15. Interesting - but not surprising - that your statistical find shows

similar numbers of suicide attempts & completions for Catholics compared to the general population. When someone is under that kind of extreme stress, logical weighing of canon laws is unlikely to stay their hand, I'd think. Except for situations of terminally ill patients with intractable pain, it's generally beyond rationality.

But I don't think this man was in that extreme state. I think he was fired with urgency to make things right, not to take himself away from his family and all possibility to correct the evil. He must have confronted them - he apparently died in their territory - and they silenced him because he would be too good a witness to their crimes. I'll bet killings for this purpose happen all the time over there - and sometimes over here too.

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Nothing Without Hope

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Thu Dec-08-05 01:51 AM
Response to Reply #4

7. An excerpt from the LA Times article on Col. Ted Westhusing's death:

Edited on Thu Dec-08-05 01:53 AM by Nothing Without Hope

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-colonel27nov27,0,6096413,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
November 27, 2005
latimes.com : World News
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ

A Journey That Ended in Anguish

Col. Ted Westhusing, a military ethicist who volunteered to go to Iraq, was upset by what he saw. His apparent suicide raises questions.

By T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer

Caption: Army Col. Ted Westhusing (West Point) November 26, 2005

(snip)

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

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.

His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.

(snip)

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Clarkie1

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Thu Dec-08-05 01:32 AM
Response to Original message

5. So sad and tragic. eom

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Mr_Spock

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Thu Dec-08-05 11:23 PM
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11. Uggh.

I'm so tired of this "war". Bush is the worst president in history - he is making our soldiers so distraught that they have to kill themselves. :(

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