Bob Rae is apparently apologizing for the Liberal staffer, Adam Carroll, who was behind the Vikileaks attack. Carroll himself, who is described as perfectly nice and hard working, is also supposed to be apologetic.
I don’t get it. I mean, when is someone on the Conservative side going to apologize for Vic Toews?
That is, apologize for Vic Toews just being Vic Toews.
The guy’s public behaviour around that internet bill has shown him to be an unrepentant dink. Vikileaks — which showed not only that he was a jerk to his ex but also that there are a host of irregularities in the way the dude spends public money — proved he isn’t fit for office. I think that makes Carroll’s actions a public service.
Also, I don’t see the Conservatives apologizing to the NDP for originally accusing them, without evidence, of being behind Vikileaks.
Anyway… speaking of public services… climate scientist Peter H Gleick is apologizing in the Huffington Post for leaking documents that expose pro-tobacco, anti-climate-science lobby group, The Heartland Institute, as tax frauds and science charlatans.
Apologizing?? Really?
And now, the organization he founded, The Pacific Institute, is investigating him for misconduct and Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in Florida, is saying journalists shouldn’t use those leaked documents because the way they were attained is tainted.
How does this backlash make any sense?
Gleick’s big crime is that he verified the authenticity of documents he’d been emailed anonymously. He did this by using a fake name to trick the Heartland Institute into emailing him documents he already had in his possession.
That may, to an academic journalist like McBride, seem shifty. But Gleick isn’t a journalist. He’s a scientist. And now a whistleblower. And while McBride says that journalists shouldn’t use the memos Gleick made public “without taking pains to verify” them, I don’t seem to recall the Poynter Institute urging the same caution over the East Anglia emails — and those emails weren’t inadvertently released, they were stolen.
What’s more, the Heartland memos have been verified. By the Heartland Institute. (Although, I hear they’re still quibbling over the strategy document, claiming it’s a fake. But DeSmogblog has gone over it with a fine tooth comb and shown it’s legit and I’ll take their word over Heartland’s, thank you very much.)
So, Gleick has nothing to feel bad about. By double checking the documents he’d been leaked, he was doing good science. And performing a public service. He deserves applause not an investigation.
Meanwhile, the Heartland Institute isn’t saying, “Er… yeah… we probably shouldn’t have claimed in our IRS filings to be paying a director who’d been dead two years. And whoops, yeah, we’re sorry about getting tax-exempt status for being a think tank when really the vast majority of what we do is lobbying the government. Maybe, if we’re going to stick to the lobbying, we should start paying taxes and register as a lobbyist organization. We’re really, really sorry for lying about that.”
No, instead they’re acting all hurt and offended because their precious annual report was made public. And because they were duped by someone using a fake email address.
Wow. If they’re that easy to trick with a bogus email, maybe I should see if they could help me get at this money I have in a bank account in Nigeria.