Frank Rich, The New York Times, 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.
Mr. Prince wasn’t trying to save his employees from legal culpability in the deaths of 17 innocent Iraqis mowed down on Sept. 16 in Baghdad. He knows that the legal loopholes granted contractors by Mr. Bremer back in 2004 amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. He knows that Americans will forget about another 17 Iraqi casualties as soon as Blackwater gets some wrist-slapping punishment.
Yet another mysterious suicide by someone who spoke the truth. Just like ‘suicide’ Gary Webb who outed the CIA providing crack cocaine to minority neighborhoods; “Fortunate Son” author J. H. Hatfield, who showed up dead from an overdose of prescription pills in 2001, just as he was telling friends he had new info on George W. Bush; and Hunter Thompson, who blew his brains out because he was getting old, supposedly. (It’s rumored Thompson was working on a book on everything he knew about Bush Junior’s past that he had refused to talk about thus far.)
Add to that the strange circumstances surrounding the suicides of Dorothy Kilgallen, who claimed she was going to blow the lid off of the JFK assassination just before she died, and the first US Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who committed suicide by jumping from a hospital room where he was being detained in a sucide watch. It’s been said that Forrestal was planning to expose the vast amount of waste and fraud in the Pentagon budget before he became suddenly suicidal.
Just lucky for the VIPs who might have been adversely affected by the information these people were planning on making public that they decided to take their own lives first.
Comment by RS Janes — October 21, 2007 @ 6:54 am