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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (176159)	11/28/2005 6:30:38 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hell, I'm shocked that a CIA "NOC" would send her former Ambassador husband on a "covert" fact finding mission to Niger. Yes it does seem odd for someone trying to retain their cover to do something like that.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (176159)	11/28/2005 6:40:07 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

'LA Times' Profiles U.S. Officer Who Committed Suicide in Iraq [EDIT: Know anything about this guy, Hawk?] By E&P Staff Published: November 27, 2005 2:30 PM ET NEW YORK In the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, reporter T. Christian Miller presents a disturbing portrait of Col. Ted Westhusing. This past June, he was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq. The Army concluded that he committed suicide with his service pistol. But why did he die? Westhusing, 44, was an unusual case: “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,” Miller explains. ”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especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.” The article continues: “On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing's family and friends have questioned the military investigation. A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question. How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?” The lengthy article recounts Westhusing’s pre-Iraq years and his time in that country helping to train Iraqis. Then he received, in May, a letter detailing wrongdoing by a contractor. The letter shook him, as he felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report. "This is a mess-- dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18. ”By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said. His death came on June 4. "He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," one official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this." After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. They revealed contents of his suicide note, most of which tells of a struggle for honor in a strange land. "I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more." Miller’s article concludes: “Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel. ”In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened. She answered: ‘Iraq.'" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com) Links referenced within this article letters@editorandpublisher.com editorandpublisher.com@editorandpublisher.com Find this article at: editorandpublisher.com

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (176159)	11/28/2005 7:32:46 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Wilson did not send her husband on the trip to Niger. She had no authority to do so. Your use of that lie shows how bad your information is. In addition, the WH's conspiracy to go after Wilson's reputation shows just how big the uranium lie was. If it was the truth, they would have been able to shut down Wilson instead of having it blow up into Fitzmas. ============ "...Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said. One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.” The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office. It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.” The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger’s “yellow cake” comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. “Five hundred tons can’t be siphoned off without anyone noticing,” another I.A.E.A. official told me. This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. “It could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don’t know,” the official said. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.” Some I.A.E.A. investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6—the branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s return to Rome. Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, “confronted the United States with the forgery: ‘What do you have to say?’ They had nothing to say.” ElBaradei’s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London....." newyorker.com

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (176159)	11/28/2005 7:47:23 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Hawk, Even though the war has not gone smoothly; and even though iraq might split into three states; and even though a civil war might ensue in any case;, and even though Talibanistine might be created in sunni areas; and even if a united iraq produces a shiaa dictatorship of sorts, future historians may still determine that getting rid of saddam was still worth it. If you imagine the world without the invasion, with sanctions going away, with inspections ending, one can get a vision of that sick bastard reconstituting his wmds, invading neighbors, blackmailing the west over oil, intimidating the neighbors and utilizing terrorists for his own purposes in a type of nazi-soviet pact where they use wmds while he escapes because of implicit threats for more of the same from the terrorists if he is not appeased. While i watched him in the dock today, he did look alot like stalin and hitler and in some very real sense the world is a far better place without him. Wish we didnt take him alive. This show is intolerable. mike