That's the question Frank Rich doesn't ask today. Should he have? Rich gives two examples (and it would be interesting to know if there were more). Both are connected to Price's Blackwater mercenaries.

Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

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.”

[Corrente covered the Westhusing story here, here, and here.]

Rich might have mentioned the interesting fact that a mercenary discovered Westhusing's body, and tampered with the evidence. (From the Corrente archives, the LA Times link having moved.) And oddly, or not, mercenary corruption is the link that connects the latest "suicide." Rich again: