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13 MAY 2023 (Saturday)
A Bitter Angel On My Shoulder
How Bureaucracy and Journalism Kills People
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - When Samson was betrayed in that moment of humiliation, chained to two pillars, God answered his summons for vengeance.
It was Janet Malcolm who said that journalism was a pathology. Then Mark Pedelty said that you could be a human being or a journalist, but not both.
Not to sound too cliché, but their insights still haunt me 30 years after reading their books.
Have I gotten anyone killed yet? I do not know. But people have lost their careers, security clearances, ended up divorced, bankruptcy, even imprisoned in U.S. Federal Prisons, and on and on. Based on articles I have written I have killed billion dollar arms deal, exposed a front company serving as an adoption service for pedophiles, destroyed a cult in DC that had training contracts with the CIA under a private contract.
The list goes on and on…
There are people in the world who hate me and would enjoy torturing me to death.
At one airshow a Washington think tanker managed the impossible - the names of the North Korean delegates visiting the expo. “Publish them!” he said. I tore it into pieces. “But why?” The answer was easy. These men had families in North Korea and exposure like this could get their entire family thrown into a gulag where their wives and daughters would be raped.
Perhaps it was my Judaism that triggered a sense of empathy. Growing up with holocaust survivors like Eva Kor made it easy to destroy that list.
Have I tormented North Korean front companies before? Yes, with great delight. But this list had the names of men with families. I can destroy an evil institution, but not a family man.
When I heard Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast on John Rizzo’s book, Company Man, on the murder of a CIA source due to a New York Times report, I felt nothing but loathing for my fellow journalists. I was also less than impressed for my friends in the CIA. Both were responsible for his death and the reasons included bureaucracy, narcissism, deranged clown car follies.
Intelligence collectors and journalists are not very different.
And I hope aspiring journalists and spies learn from his narrative:
The Road to Damascus | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell
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