Today’s Highlight
Whistleblowers
What motivates whistleblowers is the final question in “Can Whistleblowers be Betrayers?”
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Sublime
Help All!
I was parked in front of the mall wiping off my car. I had just come from the car wash and was waiting for my wife to get out of work. Coming my way from across the parking lot was what society would consider a bum.
From the looks of him, he had no car, no home, no clean clothes and no money. There are times when you feel generous but there are other times that you just don’t want to be bothered. This was one of those “don’t want to be bothered times.”
“I hope he doesn’t ask me for any money,” I thought. He didn’t.
He came and sat on the curb in front of the bus stop but he didn’t look like he could have enough money to even ride the bus.
After a few minutes he spoke. “That’s a very pretty car,” he said. He was ragged but he had an air of dignity around him. His scraggly blond beard kept more than his face warm.
I said: “thanks”, and continued wiping off my car.
He sat there quietly as I worked. The expected plea for money never came. As the silence between us widened something inside said, ” ask him if he needs any help.” I was sure that he would say “yes” but I held true to the inner voice.
“Do you need any help?” I asked.
He answered in three simple but profound words that I shall never forget. We often look for wisdom in great men and women. We expect it from those of higher learning and accomplishments.
I expected nothing but an outstretched grimy hand. He spoke the three words that shook me.
“Don’t we all?” he said.
I was feeling high and mighty, successful and important, above a bum in the street, until those three words hit me like a twelve gouge shotgun. Don’t we all?
I needed help. Maybe not for bus fare or a place to sleep, but I needed help. I reached in my wallet and gave him not only enough for bus fare, but enough to get a warm meal and shelter for the day. Those three little words still ring true.
No matter how much you have, no matter how much you have accomplished, you need help too.
No matter how little you have, no matter how loaded you are with problems, even without money or a place to sleep, you can give help.
Even if it’s just a compliment, you can give that. You never know when you may see someone that appears to have it all. They are waiting on you to give them what they don’t have. A different perspective on life, a glimpse at something beautiful, a respite from daily chaos, that only you through a torn world can see.
Maybe the man was just a homeless stranger wandering the streets. Maybe he was more than that.
Maybe he was sent by a power that is great and wise, to minister to a soul too comfortable in themselves.
Maybe God looked down, called an Angel, dressed him like a bum, then said, “go minister to that man cleaning the car, that man needs help.”
Don’t we all?
In helping others, we shall help ourselves, for whatever good we give out completes the circle and comes back to us.
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- John B. Monteiro
Can Whistleblowers Be Betrayers?
By John B. Monteiro
“To disbelieve in marriage is easy: To love a married woman is easy; but to betray a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break a covenant of bread and salt, is impossible.” — George Bernard Shaw, Irish writer.
Betrayals in love may lead to suicides, as happened in the case of two fashion models in Mumbai over the last two months. Whistleblowers are also considered betrayers by those exposed by them and are made to pay the price even unto murderous death. For instance, with the cold-blooded murder of Right of Information (RTI) activist Amit Jathwa near the Gujarat High Court in Ahmedabad on July 20,2010, the number of whistleblowers killed this year alone has gone up to eight. According to an RTI activist, after every murder, the respective State government gave a standard reply: “Matter is under investigation. We will find the culprits”. It is suspected that, may be colluding to betray their “tormentors”. But, in these cases, the RTI activists know what they are up against and factored in the risks.
But, there are cases where the betrayal by whistleblowers cause serious harm to innocent individuals and compromise state security. The latest instance is the biggest leak in intelligence history involving more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the failing war in Afghanistan by the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks. The files give blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and 1,000 US troops.
Behind the revelation of the leaks on July 26, 1010 is a complex story as tracked by Nick Davis in Guardian (London) one of the three papers, others being New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine of Germany, who were roped in to shift through the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world’s most powerful nation at war.
Tracing the roots of the exposure, Davies says that it was in November 2009 that somebody working in a high-security facility inside a US military base in Iraq started to copy secret material. Stray leakage of secret video footage from Iraq alerted Pentagon to the leakage which finally closed in on the suspect – after a very strange sequence of events. On May 21, 2010, a Californian computer hacker called Adrian Lamo was contacted by somebody with the online name Bradass87 who started to swap instant messages with him. He was immediately extraordinarily open: “hi..how are you? ..im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern bagdhad…if you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” He described how his job gave him access to two secret networks which allowed him to see “incredible things, awful things that belong to the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… almost criminal political back-dealings ..non-PR version of world events and crimes”.
Bradass87 suggested that “someone I know intimately” had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all the data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he suggested that he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labeled as Lady Gaga music, slotted them into his high security laptop and lip-synched to non-existent music to cover his downloading.
“I want people to see the truth”, he said.
On May 23 Lamo contacted Pentagon and consequently, on May 26, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning was arrested in Baghdad, shipped across the border to Kuwait and is locked up in a military prison.
There are may twists and turns and subplots in this saga of betrayal of US secrets by one who was sworn to protect them. What could have motivated him? Was it only his personal pique or a broader altruistic objective?
The subject is open to many views. What are yours? Over to you.
