General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Schieffer Destroys Snowden: ‘I Don’t Remember Martin Luther King Jr. Or Rosa Parks Hiding In China’ [View all]tblue37
(65,217 posts)I think of Dr. David Kelly in England, who supposedly committed suicide (in very questionable circumstances) after speaking out about suspicious governmental behavior surrounding the Iraq war. Or US newspaper reporter Gary Webb, who supposedly committed suicide too, after reporting on something he believed our government was up to.
Whistleblowers are human beings, and we humans are definitely a flawed bunch.
Just because a whistleblower is not a saint or is not willing to be a martyr, that does not mean he doesn't have important information to share with a public deliberately kept in the dark about its own government's activities. He can be a fool, a jerk, a "coward," a misogynist, a narcissist, or any one of a lot of other unappealing things. (For example, Scott Ritter, the WMD inspector who tried to--entirely appropriately--blow the whistle on the CheneyBush administration's nonsense about Iraq having WMDs, apparently had a thing for young girls.)
In fact, the whistleblower's motives for blowing the whistle can be totally self-serving--even awful or disgusting--without necessarily making the information false or insignificant.
Of course, the more sleazy his character and the more suspect his motivations, the more carefully his information needs to be examined and verified before we take him at his word and start running around with our hair on fire, throwing people from our own side under the bus. But to use the inevitable fact that such a whistleblower is flawed to simply dismiss him automatically, without looking at his information and thinking carefully about it is unwise.
What troubles me are the posts that seem to claim that if Snowden has any human flaws, that means we should automatically dismiss everything he has to say. Unfortunately, there seem to be quite a lot of those posts.