Watergate Scandal ‘Deep Throat’
Watergate scandal refers to the capture of President Nixon’s fraud. Five men were arrested on June the 17th 1972 on the sixth floor of the Watergate hotel building in Washington inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The five burglars had $2,300, lock-picking equipment, a walkie talkie, radio scanner, two cameras 40 rolls of unused film, tear-gas guns and bugs. These men were working for the president. The was one of the schemes he used in order to get re-elected.This incident lead to him being the first ever US president to resign as he was not able to cover up the incident because someone with the pseudonym ‘Deep Throat’ whistle blew.Former FBI agent W.Mark helped two reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the truth.
The second famous example of whistle blowing is one of Erin Brockovich.
Erin Brockovich was again an American whistle blower. She came to work in a law firm called Masry & Vitiate as a file clerk. Here she discovered medical records which worried her. What she found is that countless number of people who lived around Hinkley in California from 1960s to 1980s had been severely damaged because of the exposure to the chemical Chromium VI. The chemical had leaked into the ground from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s compressor station. She started legal case against them in 1993 – another example of whistle blowing.
The last famous example I will discuss in this article is one of Dr David Kelly which didn’t end as happily as the others.
In 2002 the government asked Dr David Kelly a scientist ti check the draft version of a dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction in preparation for the invasion in Iraq in 2003. He was concerned about the statement that Iraq was capable of firing battlefield biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes if receiving an order to do so. Subsequently he made journey to Iraq later on that year to inspect two mobile weapon laboratories. He discovered that the statement he was concerned about was actually false and he told a journalist from the Observer that ‘They are not germ warfare. You could not use them for making biological weapons’. In the following years as Kelly spread the word he was given a warning by the Ministry of defence and had to appear before two committees of the House of Commons. Sadly in 2003 when he was working in his home in Oxfordshire he went for a walk and was found dead. They say it was ‘suicide’ – he ‘swallowed 29 Co-proxamol tablets before cutting his left wrist with a knife’.
Whistle blowing in the news – October 2010
Former whistleblower Andrew Wilkie announces his opinion
NHS introducing new ways to make it easy to whistle blow on malpractice
Sacked for whistle blowing Atlas Air
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