Letters to the Editor
Publican
Published Letters: 112 Editor's Choice: 1
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The psychology and institutional reality of Whistleblowing
[Read the article: Is Michael Mukasey prioritizing the harassment and imprisonment of journalists?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Notes on spacewalking: Ellsberg as Orwell's Last Man.
"Whistleblowers: broken lives & organizational power" by C. Fred Alford (Cornell U. Press. 2001)
"What the scapegoat knows"
Let us call this whistleblower I am talking about the last man. Not Nietzche's last man, who wants nothing more than a comfortable existence, but George Orwell's last man in "1984", Winston Smith, who sacrifices everything for a little piece of "ownlife". Exposed and tortured by O'Brian, Simth is finally placed before a three-paneled mirror, the kind one finds in clothing stores so one can see if the suit fits. Pale, naked, looking like a skeleton, missing some teeth, Smith doesn't recognize himself for a moment. Says O'Brian, "If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct". The whistleblower is the last man, not just tortured, but exposed and sacrificed so that others might see what it costs to be an individual in this benighted world. ...
What if the autonomous individual exists, but the organization can not stand it, mobilizing vast resources in the service of the individual's destruction? ... Rather than assume that the individual exists, or does not, it may be more fruitful to focus on the ceremonies of his destruction. Consider the possibility that the individual destroyed is still ann individual. Indeed, the individual destroyed is the best archaeological evidence of the individual's clandestine presence in history.
To run up against the organization is to risk obliteration. In a totalitarian regime, nothing remains after one runs afoul of the organization. Before his arrest, Winston Smith's job was to alter the historical record so as to make it appear that dissidents had never been born. In a democratic society, the sacrificed individual remains. If we listen to him or her, we may learn something not just about individuality but about the forces that confront it. ...
How can we best learn from the last man? ... I think the whistleblower has as much to teach us about politics as about suffering. Or rather, it is the suffering of the whistleblower that connects these two terms. The story of the first scapegoat will tell us why [recounts Leviticus 16:21-22] ...
Think about how much the scapegoat must know. For may whistleblowers, this knowledge is like a mortal illness. ... They do not just know the sins of the tribe, they are afflicted with them. My plan has been to follow the scapegoat into the desert of his exile and there to study his affliction so that I might learn the sins of the tribe. ...
When I listen to whistleblowers, I feel awe at one who has stepped outside the skin of the world and lived to tell about it. ..Daniel Ellsberg.. said that his former friends and colleagues regarded him with neither admiration nor censure but with wonder, as though he were a space-walking astronaut who had cut his lifeline to the mother ship. What was this mother ship? Was it the academic-military-industrial complex, the system, the organization? Call it what you will, it is not so much a precise concept as an overwhelming feeling. ...
This [feeling] is so important ..because of what it tells us about the forces that hold society together and their consequences: the willingness of most people to do anything not to be sent space-walking....
To be a whistleblower is to step outside the Great Chain of Being, to join not just another religion, but another world. Sometimes this world is called the margins of society, but to the whistleblower it feels like outer space. ...
Being a whistleblower means stepping outside [society's transcendent moral] order. It is a momentous step. Most people, including the whistleblower, don't recognize it as such until the whistleblower has done it. The he or she knows what it is to go space-walking. ...
Modern society is marked by multiple centers of meaning, so that, for example, a whistleblower might turn to his or her religion to find meaning after being fired by General Motors for blowing the whistle. It's a good theory, but it does not work so well in real life. Meaning tends to follow power, and power works to discipline the whistleblower in ways that isolate him or her from alternative sources of meaning. Much may be learned by studying how this happens."
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Failure of "exclusive means" amendment is worse
[Read the article: Amnesty Day for Bush and lawbreaking telecoms]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If it is possible to imagine anything worse than retroactive immunity for corporate crime and profiteering while vioalting the rights of Americans, the failure of the "exclsuive means" amendment is even worse.
The Senate just ratified Bush's radical assertion of extra-constitutional exeucutive power that can not be checked by Congress or the Courts or any law.
Bush actually has asserted even broader than his "inherent powers" under the Constitution. Those powers can be checked by Congress and the courts.
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Am I on a Watch list?
[Read the article: The Obama passport snooping and the unchecked surveillance state]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The surveillance national security corporate state has gone crazy.
I triggered a regional FBI and Homeland Security electronic warning response and a subsequent investigation (3 investigators visited my home) for taking photographs and posting them as a blogger on NJ's largest newspaper's website. One investigator claimed I could be a domestic "Chechen terrorist seeking to blow up a chemical plant by a school".
The photo's were taken in the course of journalistic and political activity (i.e. a critique of pending Corzine Administration legislation that provided subsidies to refineries). No stealth or secrecy on my part - all done above board - on environmental issues I've been working on very visibly as a State agency professional and activist in Trenton for over 20 years.
I was also detained for hours by local police, who illegally searched my car, confiscated my camera , seized personal documents and took pictures of me at the police station "for their records".
I contacted FISA champion Congressman Rush Holt (my representative) for help - he was not sympathetic and his staffer was outright hostile. Holt's office said they had no access to FBI or Homeland Security watch lists or records. ACLU was equally unsupportive and suggested I buy an airline ticket or seek a rifle permit to see if I was on no fly or restricted list.