Ryan Gallagher for the New Statesman has compiled an interesting list of seven great whistleblowers. They are:
Joe Darby (Abu Ghraib)
Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers)
Mark Felt (Watergate)
Katharine Gun (bugging the UN)
Clive Ponting (the Belgrano)
Frank Serpico (NYPD corruption)
Mordechai Vanunu (Israel’s nuclear weapons programme)
Bradley Manning, accused of the leak of US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, is listed as a possible eighth.
I don’t know much about many of the list, but I do know about Ponting (above) and I do not think he should be on it. He is a transparently decent person who undoubtedly believed that he was doing the right and principled thing, and the jury agreed with him. But the fact remains that he was wrong.
Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, became obsessed with the fact that the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano was sailing away from the Falklands at the time it was sunk with the loss of 323 lives. The Ministry of Defence foolishly tried to suppress this information, and Ponting leaked it. But it was irrelevant, because British intelligence had intercepted orders to the ship to attack British forces, which is what its captain, Hector Bonzo, admitted he intended to do in a television interview in 2003.
The Belgrano was, as Margaret Thatcher said, a threat to British ships and a legitimate target.
Eagle Eye 