Whistleblowers:
Fired,
Silenced . . . And Killed
By Peter Rost
02 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Whistleblowers
are traitors. There is no question that this is what most corporations
and government entities think. It doesn’t matter if the target
is a private corporation, such as Enron with whistleblower Sherron Watkins,
a government entity such as the FDA with whistleblower David Graham
or an entire country, such as President Putin’s Russia, which
former Russian KGB agent and whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko harshly
criticized.
All these entities react
the same way: Shut down the whistleblower. Fire him, silence him, or
kill him, whatever it takes.
It is no secret that former
Enron CEO Ken Lay immediately contacted his lawyers and tried to come
up with a way to fire Sherron Watkins after she wrote an e-mail warning
him that “I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave
of accounting scandals.”
It is also no secret that
the FDA brass tried to shut down David Graham. Dr. Graham said, “Prior
to my Senate testimony in mid-November of 2004, there was an orchestrated
campaign by senior level FDA managers to intimidate me so that I would
not testify before Congress.”
Dr. Graham explained that
this intimidation took several forms. The FDA tried to stop an article
he wrote for the Lancet; they contacted Senator Grassley's office and
attempted to prevent him from calling Dr. Graham as a witness and his
superiors even posed as whistleblowers and contacted Dr. Graham’s
attorney and attempted to convince him that he should not represent
Dr. Graham.
And as far as the ex-KGB
spy Alexander Litvinenko goes, we all know by now that he was poisoned
in the U.K. with deadly polonium-210, which is extremely hard to come
by unless you own a nuclear reactor. In fact, Polonium 210 is highly
radioactive and extremely toxic. By weight, it is 250 million times
as toxic as cyanide. This means a particle smaller than a dust mote
could be fatal if ingested or inhaled. Polonium 210 destroys the internal
organs, and death is slow, painful and sure. There is no antidote. No
one knows for sure if Russia did this, but most observers have concluded
that another former spy, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin probably
knows who did it.
And Putin certainly had the
motive. Back in 1998 Litvinenko accused his security bosses of ordering
the murder of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. The tycoon fled to
Britain, where Litvinenko soon followed, supported by Berezovsky. It
didn’t help Litvinenko that he continued to openly criticize Russia
and started to investigate the death of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian
journalist who also had been very critical of Putin. And it doesn’t
help Russian President Putin that his critics appear to die like flies
around him. Not that this means Mr. Putin did anything. He may just
be a lucky guy, who happens to have short-lived critics.
Most noticeable, however,
is the Russian media’s reaction. The Putin-controlled Russian
television networks reported that Mr. Litvinenko did not die of poison,
but of "intrigues" in the Russian exile community in London.
Mr. Litvinenko was, according to Russian television, "a pawn in
a game that he did not understand."
Reality is that most people
never get into a situation such as the one Sherron Watkins, David Graham
or Alexander Livinenko found themselves in. Most people silently agree
to do whatever their company bosses, party bosses or government tells
them to do, and look the other way when things get ugly. Commit a few
illegal accounting tricks, fine. Let the public die because drugs are
unsafe, no problem. Kill a big-mouth oligarch, hey if you’re in
the KGB, that’s what you do, right? This is a great strategy for
survival but it is certainly not a path to bravery.
In fact, Senator Grassley
has repeatedly stated, “Whistleblowers are American heroes.”
I’d only add that they are heroes wherever they appear. And especially
today, with more and more rampant corruption we need more such heroes.
Because, as Edmund Burke
said, “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men
to do nothing.”
Peter Rost, M.D.,
is a former Vice President of Pfizer. He became well known in 2004 when
he emerged as the first drug company executive to speak out in favor
of reimportation of drugs. He is the author of “The
Whistleblower, Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman,”
http://the-whistleblower-by-peter-rost.blogspot.com/.
He also writes the daily "Dr. Peter Rost blog," http://peterrost.blogspot.com/.
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