All roads lead to Westhusing

Blog Simple has reported before on the strange case of Col. Ted Westhusing, who allegedly committed suicide while serving in Iraq.

Now that there are investigations into the disappearance of weapons in Iraq, his name has come up again:

He was supervising the private contractor that the U.S. government hired to train Iraqi security forces. And based on e-mails he got from his brother, Tim Westhusing believes Ted Westhusing had gotten in the middle of the missing weapons scandal that's now coming to light, in which the U.S. government's accountability office says 190,000 AK-47s and pistols are unaccounted for.

"He talked more about the corruption. He talked about it in general terms, the corruption, the killings, the missing equipment, those sorts of things,” Westhusing said.

Newsweek has more:

But there were also signs of problems more serious than bad record-keeping. One of Petraeus's subordinates, Col. Theodore Westhusing, had taken leave from his position as a professor of ethics at West Point to serve a six-month tour as commander of the unit training counterterrorism and Special Operations Forces. By the spring of 2005, Westhusing had grown increasingly concerned about the corruption he thought he saw in the program. He was especially upset after receiving an anonymous letter on May 19, 2005, which claimed there was outright fraud by government contractors. Among the alleged problems: failure to account for almost 200 guns.
Westhusing passed the letter up the chain of command. A few days later he wrote a formal memo saying he thought the charges were off-base. But at the same time his conversations and e-mails with his family members became cryptic and he seemed concerned for his safety. Colleagues said he looked exhausted and preoccupied. On June 5, 2005, Westhusing was found dead in his temporary quarters at Camp Dublin near Baghdad airport, apparently having shot himself with his own pistol. "I cannot support a [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuses and liars," he wrote in a note found near his body. "Death before being dishonored any more. Trust is essential—I don't know who to trust anymore."

I suggest reading my earlier post, and especially follow the link to this article (which I just helpfully included). The upshot is that Westhusing believed that Petraeus and Fil, his direct superiors, knew about the rampant corruption, and chose to do nothing.