Outside a Santa Fe, New Mexico bar, “[a] Los Alamos lab whistleblower scheduled to testify before Congress about alleged financial irregularities was badly beaten … an attack his wife and lawyer believe was designed to silence him,” reports the WaPo.
Background from MSNBC: “Tommy Hook [PHOTO] and another whistleblower sued the University of California in March, alleging that after they uncovered management failures, university and lab managers tried to make their jobs miserable so they would quit. Hook, a former internal auditor who now works at another job at the lab, had been scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee later this month.” MSNBC says he was left for dead outside.
Keith Olbermann fans: This is KO’s #1 story tonight.
my bleeding liberal heart is haemorrhaging.
Whistleblowers are citizen reporters, we have to protect them. This is terrible.
I’ve had a hard time finding more info on him. I hope Keith does a bang-up job tonight and tells us more about this man’s story.
It’s horrible that he was beaten and threatened. It’ll have a chilling effect on other would-be whistleblowers.
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001590.html
Los Alamos whistleblower “Tommy Hook is still hospitalized today after being brutally assaulted over the weekend,” the Project on Government Oversight is saying. “A group of three to four assailants threatened Hook to keep silent, in apparent reference to his upcoming Congressional testimony on fraud at Los Alamos.”
Mr. Hook was slated to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this month. Congressional staff from the Committee were already scheduled to arrive Tuesday, June 7th to investigate Tommy Hook’s allegations. Also flying out tomorrow is the Project On Government Oversight’s Senior Investigator Peter Stockton who investigated the 1974 murder of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood in his previous position as a Congressional investigator.
Mr. Hook had planned at the end of last week to meet an individual who claimed to have corroborating information about fraud at Los Alamos. That individual never attended the meeting. Late Saturday evening, someone who might have been posing as that individual called Mr. Hook and asked to meet with him at a bar in Santa Fe. He went to the bar and waited but that person never showed up. When Mr. Hook got into his car to leave, attackers pulled him out of the car and brutally assaulted him. The assailants threatened Mr. Hook to keep silent. A bouncer at the bar intervened and broke up the attack. Mr. Hook was hospitalized in an Emergency Room with severe trauma to his face and head, including a fractured jaw, and a herniated disk. He is heavily medicated today and unable to speak to the media.[…]
“It’ll have a chilling effect on other would-be whistleblowers.”
As it was no doubt intended to do.
I hope he can ID his attackers and that the DA throws the book at them, makes them sing, and they ID whoever hired them.
Wasn’t it also at Los Alamos a few years ago that the Chinese-American scientist, whose name escapes me, was falsely accused, tried in the press, vilified for a couple of years, and only recently cleared. Long after everyone had linked “guilty” and his name in their minds.
Yup. And here’s what Laurie Garrett said the day she quit Newsday — from my Kos diary on that statement:
by SusanHu
Tue Mar 8th, 2005 at 09:26:14 PDT
… the “media’s inaccurate and inappropriate convictions of Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill” and “an investigative reporting team [unnamed] that relied on a single source for a series that smeared the life of an innocent man” …
Wen Ho Lee was the Los Alamos scientist put through the wringer.
Thanks. I kept thinking of Yoo or Yee, but I think that’s the torture guy. (One of many)
I turned on my TV for the first time in months this morning, to see if anything had changed… they stuck this story in between one of Michael Jackson not feeling well and Russell Crowe throwing a phone at someone. I turned it off again, probably for a few more months.
This is one freaky story, and raises even more concerns that things are just getting worse and worse, and the atmosphere where violence against ‘dissenters’ or whistleblowers or judges is becoming something that is more accepted. Or that it is assumed to be.
Is there someway we can help this person? Funds? Letters?
Good Qs. It sounds like he’s still working so he’s probably okay financially. But he’d surely love to get letters of support!
Can you hunt around and find out which hospital he’s at? It should be in Santa Fe.
WHO: Suzanne Hook, wife of Mr. Hook; Chuck Montano, co-worker who blew whistle with Mr. Hook; Bob Rothstein, attorney representing Mr. Hook and Mr. Montano.
WHAT: Press conference to receive statements concerning situation with Mr. Hook.
WHERE: Law firm of Rothstein, Donatelli, Hughes, Dahlstrom & Schoenburg, 1215 Paseo De Peralta, phone# 505-988-8004.
TO CALL IN: Conference line 1-888-446-2816 and enter #57632.
WHEN: Today at 3:00 p.m. New Mexico time/5:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time
http://www.pogo.org/p/homeland/ha-050601-hook.html
You’re good, Sybil. Like a bloodhound, you are. So we could send letters of support via his law firm.
Thanks SusanHu, you are true blue.
I emailed POGO for a more direct email address but
they must be very busy right now, so I’m not banking
on a rapid reply.
Who would have thought there was such a site as POGO?
THE PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT
It’s a project for exposing corruption and exploring solutions.
I am a member of my local newspaper’s citizen advisory council and just yesterday answered a lengthy questionaire about the use of anonymous sources. With the Newsweek controversy and the revelation of Paul Felt as Deep Throat, this is very topical.
We need to protect and encourage whistleblowers like this man. There is a special place in Hell, alongside James Dobson and the entire Bush administration, for whomever is behind his brutal beating.
This is awful. I often worry when one of our more agressive diarists digs deep into a story or allegations that something like this will happen to them. These are the times of lawlessness. Will this give the administration more to base a police state on? I wonder. I fear.
Then they come and hide out with me,I have all sorts of guerilla tactics that haven’t been used for eons.
May I come too? We all may need some training in these tactics soon…sure hope I am wrong.
no prob-show up with your freak flag flying
that was refernce to ‘Almost cut my hair’ by crosby.stills,nash and young btw 🙂
Getting heavy rotation on my – fairly recently acquired – iPod.
Copying all that old stuff over to the pod was an excellent oportunity to rediscover many old gems – such as most of the CSNY-catalogue (Ohio, So Far, Carry On, etc).
I was at a CSNY concert in Buffalo the summer of Nixon’s resignation.It was an amazing experience – like a huge OMMMMM- the huge stadium got absolutely silent when the opening notes to ‘Ohio’ were played.
and almost every winter they do a benefit concert for Aloha Schools. One of the last winters while I was living there I attended that concert. It was in the ballroom of the Princeville Hotel. Talk about an intimate setting. I was in awe. It was like sitting in the livingroom with them and about five hundred people. I was steps to the stage. They also had Jackson Brown and Nicollette Larsen sit in with the. They sang and told stories and it was just amazing.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOO neat
Wow.
You’re giving me goosebumps with that imagery…
That was to both shycat and alohaleezy
It was almost eerie-never seen anything like it before or since.:)
Wouldn’t beating someone who was scheduled to testify at a Congressional Hearing (to “silence him”) lead to more publicity for that testimony (which, otherwise, would not have made much news)? I’m not (normally) sceptical, but this is very fishy to me.
Please don’t forget about Sherole Eaton of Hocking County Ohio. I received this email from a CASEOhio activist.
To see more, go to:
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2005/1140 The site http://www.freepress.org has many items on the election. Or look at these sites; http://ohioelection2004.com.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com;
countpaperballots.com www.ohiohonestelections.org
Jon Craig had a story in the Columbus Dispatch on 6/6/05 on Sherole Eaton.
From the Logan Daily
http://logandaily.com/main.asp?sectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=119029
This man has:
This dreadful shit has GOT TO STOP.
How much more will it take?
I have some fond memories of the sixties and seventies when we took to the streets- but we were the Boomers, the world’s biggest, most powerful generation.
What have we wrought?
We got lazy is what we did.
My dear friend Tony yelled at me the other day about that.
“We got LAZY”.
I forgot another item his wife mentioned: He needs speech therapy to be able to speak again.
Guess he won’t be testifying for a while.
oh dear, and a lot of other words I will not say in order not to offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities. :))