Media Ignore Whistleblowers
Media Monitor | By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid | March 12, 2001
They all exposed serious wrongdoing.
When we try to get the establishment media to report on serious scandals like the cover-ups of the murder of Vincent Foster and the shoot down of TWA Flight 800 that they have ignored, they say that if what we tell them were true, someone on the inside would have come forward to expose the cover-up. On February 21 a conference was held in Washington that featured eight whistleblowers who have exposed official wrongdoing in the federal government offices where they were employed.
Every one of them suffered reprisals for doing the right thing — coming forward to expose dishonesty, illegalities and incompetence that were being tolerated, if not encouraged, by their superiors. Five of them no longer work for the government, having been forced out of their jobs and having had their careers blighted because they exposed bad things that were being covered up. Three of them still work for the government, but they have suffered discrimination. Their talents are not being fully utilized.
They all exposed serious wrongdoing. Fred Whitehurst exposed incompetence and dishonesty in the FBI crime lab. He was vindicated by the Justice Department's inspector general and some reforms were made, but he was forced out of the FBI. Notra Trulock was director of intelligence at the Department of Energy. He tried to get something done about security problems at the national laboratories where our highly secret atomic weapons are developed. His career was ruined and he doubts he would do it again.
Trying to protect our national security is not appreciated at the Department of Defense either. Peter Leitner has exposed the deplorable state of security vis a vis Chinese efforts to acquire our most secret technology. He says that Silicon Valley is flooded with Chinese who are not subjected to any background checks. He has exposed criminal laxity in approval of technology exports to China, and he has suffered reprisals, but he is hanging on and fighting back.
Sheryl Hall lost her White House job because she protested the illegal sharing of a data base with the DNC and later exposed the secret illegal sequestering of White House e-mails that were subject to subpoenas. Shelley Davis exposed the destruction of important documents at the IRS and lost her job as IRS historian. Linda Shenwick exposed serious waste and corruption at the UN. She lost her job at the U.S. Mission to the UN for telling the truth to Congress.
Tom Kalil, a senior official at the Department of Agriculture, is in the doghouse because he protested a deal under which twelve thousand blacks have been paid fifty thousand tax-free dollars each. They have claimed that they applied for a government farm loan as far back as 1981 and didn't get it because of their race. The government has paid out six-hundred million dollars so far. It signed a consent decree that required no proof from a claimant except his word, supported by a friend, that he was denied a loan because of his race. This has gone largely unreported because even when people risk their jobs and tell the truth, the big media tend to ignore them. They didn't report this conference, but the AIM Report will.
Reed Irvine is the former Chairman of Accuracy In Media and Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report.
0 Comments | Post a Comment
