'Cause suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.
...and you can do the same thing if you please.
There are a few essential reads. The late MS Ivins was certainly one. Pul Krugman is a necessity. And increasingly it is impossible to skip over the work of the former Broadway critic for the New York Times, Frank Rich.
I should be asleep, but I am having a sinus problem. I read his magnificent column in today's Times, entitled Suicide is Not Painless more than three hours ago. I strongly suggested that someone diary about it. I find that so far no one has, so I will. I will get to the content of the piece below the jump, but for those who don't recognize the source, I need to explain the title.
One of the great anti-war movies of all times is Robert Altman 's 1970 masterpiece, "Mash." Ostensibly set in Korea, it was a clearly sardonic look at the Vietnam war. And the theme was a song entitled "Suicide is Painless, the refrain for which appears above.
The occasion of the op ed piece is explained in the very beginning of the piece:
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.
A decorated former Air Force Officer, his service had arranged for a contractor to place him on its payroll until he got clearance for his new Pentagon job, but several weeks before his death this "arrangement" was exposed, and he admitted he had done nothing for the company in question, even as he received more than $26,000, a pittance when compared to the more than $6 Billion in waste and fraud that is being investigated SLOWLY by Justice and Defense. Rich notes
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.
The window, as one might expect, contains multiple connections to Blackwater. Let me quote again, somewhat more extensively:
Which brings us back to Mr. Riechers. As it happens, he was only about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job, managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been previously held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was sentenced to nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her daughter and her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with billions of dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun’s Pentagon post remained vacant until Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean up the corruption.
Yet the full story of the corruption during Ms. Druyun’s tenure is even now still unknown. The Bush-appointed Pentagon inspector general delivered a report to Congress full of holes in 2005. Specifically, black holes: dozens of the report’s passages were redacted, as were the names of many White House officials in the report’s e-mail evidence on the Boeing machinations.
The inspector general also assured Congress that neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz knew anything about the crimes. Senators on the Armed Services Committee were incredulous. John Warner, the Virginia Republican, could not believe that the Pentagon’s top two officials had no information about "the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history."
But the inspector general who vouched for their ignorance, Joseph Schmitz, was already heading for the exit when he delivered his redacted report. His new job would be as the chief operating officer of the Prince Group, Blackwater’s parent company.
We already knew that Cofer Black, formerly in charge of counter-terrorism, was a high-ranking official at Blackwater. And apparently this information about Schmitz was in the report available to those on the Hill who got to examine Prince during his testimony, but perhaps because they had done such a poor job of preparation, did not become a major part of the news cycle. And now he, too is a ranking figure working for Erik Prince. Somehow I think we the American people were entitled to know that. We should not have had to wait until the weekend and an op ed column: it should have been a major part of the news cycle. Why was Schmitz hired, what protection has possible Prince thereby obtained for Blackwater? How far does the stench and the reality of corruption stretch?
Fortunately we have Frank Rich to help us understand. Paul Behrends in the lobbyist and sometimes spokesman for Blackwater. He previously represented Prince and Blackwater while working for the Alexander Group, founded by a former Delay staffer and heavily involved in the Jack Abramoff scandals. And among his other clients there was First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company, the builder of the huge embassy complex in Baghdad that is more than $100 million over budget. Rich gives us some more context, in two brief paragraphs:
That Vatican-sized complex is the largest American embassy in the world. Now running some $144 million over its $592 million budget and months behind schedule, the project is notorious for its deficient, unsafe construction, some of which has come under criminal investigation. First Kuwaiti has also been accused of engaging in human trafficking to supply the labor force. But the current Bush-appointed State Department inspector general — guess what — has found no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Both that inspector general, Howard Krongard, and First Kuwaiti are now in the cross hairs of Henry Waxman’s House oversight committee. Some of Mr. Krongard’s deputies have accused him of repeatedly halting or impeding investigations in a variety of fraud cases.
Let's stop for a moment and review. We have one inspector general who presents a report on a contracting scandal with much of the report excised, who gives assurances that a senior Republican senator implies are preposterous, who then goes to work for Blackwater, which is represented by a lobbyist whose other clients have included a company now being investigated for massive fraud while a new Inspector General seems to be impeding any investigation. Rich does not say so, but does not this seem remarkably parallel to some of what we have been able to find out about the scandals involving U.S. Attorneys? And if Mukasey is confirmed and will not pursue contempt of Congress charges, is not that even further reason for the kind of outrage about which I wrote yesterday, in a diary which drew a huge response from this community?
Rich is not done. And I cannot illustrate all of what he present. He talks about the corruption in the Iraqi government, with the judge who was investigating being forced to flee to the U.S., with dozens of his staff and their families being assassinated, often after being tortured.
Only lower level Americans have been prosecuted: like Abu Ghraib the upper levels have been protected. Rich also notes the role of "Hillary Clinton’s Karl Rove, Mark Penn" in preparing Prince for his Hill testimony. The level of expenditure to rebuild Iraq exceeds those to rebuild Japan, two of whose cities were destroyed by nuclear weapons. The column keeps driving home the points Rich wants us to grasp.
Rich had said that Riechers death was not the first suicide associated with the corruption scandal. At the end he reminds us of the death of Col. Ted Westhusing, found with a gunshot wound to his head and a pistol by his side, dead at age 44, while working directly for David Petraeus. Let me offer the final two paragraphs of this powerful piece by Frank Rich,before offering some comments of my own.
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."
Many in the military maintain a sense of honor, and if that honor is violated they may well take their own lives. Here I think of Admiral Mike Boorda, Chief of Naval Operations under Bill Clinton. He had worn a bronze star with combat V that he honestly thought he was entitled to wear. When the late David Hackworth wrote a piece that directly challenged Boorda on that, Boorda felt he had dishonored his uniform and his service, and put a gun to his chest and killed himself. He is the highest ranking U.S. military officer known to have committed suicide.
Our military has been abused and dishonored by this administration. It started early with the mistreatment of Eric Shinsecki, a four-star general who committed the grave error of speaking the truth, that we needed several hundred thousand troops to maintain control in Iraq. he may have underestimated the scope of the task. After all, if we count our total force,which including contractors is now 350,000 with no control to maintain, his warning seems more than a little understated. yes, I am well aware that many contractors do not carry arms, are performing support services. But those were services previously done by the military for itself, usually at a significantly lower cost to the American taxpayer, and with far less incompetence and corruption.
We have seen those who have spoken out getting savaged, with insufficient defense from political opponents of the administration, or even completely honest coverage by the media. They have been generals: John Batiste, Paul Eaton, now Rick Sanchez. They were company grade officers: Paul Rieckhoff, and our own Angry Rakkasan and Broken Skull. They were sergeants who wrote an op ed in the New York Times.
The pattern of corruption has been unmistakable for years. So hs the pattern of demeaning and attempting to destroy anyone who dared to disagree, to offer a truth that contradicted the message the administration wished to portray. The press has failed miserably to make this clear to the American people. Despite that, most Americans now believe we went into the war on false pretenses, and a strong majority wants us to get out. And still the opposition party in the Congress will not act forcefully. And Americans and Iraqis continue to die, to have their bodies mangled and their psyches shattered.
We had a brouhaha, or even worse, because MoveOn.org associated the words Betray Us with General Petraeus, even though, as Brandon Friedman pointed out, that expression was not at all unknown among those who had served under the General, as had he. I wonder then what those who so brayed about the ad will say about the implications of this piece. Read again the final words of Ted Westusing:
"I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars," Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. "I am sullied."
Let me quote words from Rich earlier in the column, about corruption, to which I had previously alluded:
The Waxman investigations notwithstanding, the culture of corruption, Iraq war division, remains firmly entrenched. Though some American bribe-takers have been caught — including Gloria Davis, an Army major who committed suicide in Kuwait after admitting her crimes last year — we are asked to believe they are isolated incidents. The higher reaches of the chain of command have been spared, much as they were at Abu Ghraib.
I read the framing of Westhusing's parting as a subtle accusation by Rich that the levels of corruption lead to Petraeus, that he had to be aware lf the corruption, the human rights abuses. Perhaps I am wrong. But I would be hard put to see any high ranking officer who has continued with this effort not at least being sullied by the stench of corruption that permeates our Iraqi adventure.
I could not sleep because of sinuses. At least, I thought it was because of sinus. Perhaps it was because this column by Frank Rich was gnawing away at me.
I said earlier someone needed to diary about it. I have now used my Sunday diary for that purpose.
My outrage is not yet played out. For the sake of this nation, for the many men and women wbo place their lives in harm's way because they believe they are serving a noble cause of defending our nation and spreading liberty, we have an obligation to demand that the truth be exposed. The corruption and the coverup are evil, do not doubt that. The destruction and the profiteering are impoverishing our nation as well as destroying Iraq. The continued shifting of power to private entities outside the control of the American people represents an undermining of all that we hold dear.
In World War II, while we were in the midst of the conflict, Harry Truman lead an important investigation into war profiteering. Freshmen senators Webb and McCaskill seek similar investigations today. We need those investigations. And there can be no claim of state secrets when the Congress of the United States, the elected representatives of the American people, seek to ensure that the people's money is spent appropriately, that actions taken in their names are proper, legal and constitutional. And not immoral or crimes against humanity.
It is very simple. The future of this nation as a democracy is in the balance. The world is also in the balance, because we have a military with the ability to put nuclear weapons anywhere it wants. And if we do not properly restrain the civilian authority that is supposed to control that military, what is to prevent it from using such weapos: on Iran or any other nation that it deems a threat to the United States? Should not we through our elected representatives have a say about that? If not, then the Republic is already lost, we have not, Ben Franklin, been able to keep it.
Will anyone on the Hill or seeking the presidency speak the plain truth on all of thise? Will we support fully anyone who takes on that responsibility? If not, all is lost.
What will we do?