
Who ordered the car bomb that killed Maltese journalist Daphne Galizia? (2018) - tslocum
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/22/630866527/mastermind-behind-malta-journalist-killing-remains-a-mystery
======
Hokusai
> "I was openly accused of damaging my country's reputation by talking about
> corruption,"

I have seen this at a smaller scale in several companies. Human resources will
negate any wrong doing of abusive upper management to avoid "damaging the
company". As, many good employees leave the company, lack motivation or
passive-aggressively sabotage projects the company suffers massive damage,
losses opportunities and money.

The people protecting corruption or abuse are not all evil, none of them is in
moral high-ground, thou. But, it is the way companies are designed to reward
personal loyalty to upper-management what makes the so prone to corruption and
inefficiencies.

Design a company, or a country, that rewards loyalty to the company - not to
the managers or rulers - and it will be extremely successful.

Meanwhile we are stuck in a situation that even assassination takes a long
time to untangle and have an effect. It could be worse, at least we know what
happened and we are free to talk about it. Improvement takes one step at at
time.

~~~
jimbob45
I'm not sure what you're arguing. Rewarding loyalty to the company typically
takes the form of profit sharing, wherein employees would be incentivized to
ignore management abuse (for instance) because they know raising the alarm
will detract from the company's profits and, thus, their own profits.

Are you advocating for profit sharing/wealth redistribution in a really
indirect way?

~~~
numakerg
> Are you advocating for profit sharing/wealth redistribution in a really
> indirect way?

Why not? I would support mandatory stock options based on the number of
employees. In reality though, I think it would be defeated by creative
accounting just like taxation.

~~~
luckylion
How would stock options change anything in that regard? If you blow the
whistle, the price decreases and your options are worth less money. You still
have incentive to keep your mouth shut.

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qubex
Quite coincidentally I am currently living in Malta, and have for about nine
months now. The place is... quixotic. The whole economy depends on tourism,
internet gambling, offshore companies, and real estate (driven by the first
directly and the second two indirectly).

This journalist’s death occurred well before I arrived but one does not need
to look hard to the marks she left: there’s graffiti and stickers mentioning
‘Daphne’ all over the place. The prime minister Joseph Muscat was eventually
forced to resign in January of this year over her death.

And yet, there’s a general sense that this case will never be satisfactorily
closed, that the full story will never come to the surface, that the truth
will never be known.

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jph
Daphne Caruana Galizia is among my personal heroes -- an extraordinary
professional who worked tirelessly to publish the truth about power,
corruption, and lies. Her work on the Panama Papers directly affected one of
my consulting projects, and inspired my whole team to work better together.

~~~
squarefoot
Another one that should never be forgotten along with Daphne Caruana Galizia
is Anna Politkovskaya.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya)

Sadly the list of journalists killed because they didn't want to sell out is
long and growing steadily.

~~~
lkrubner
I just got done reading "Is Journalism Worth Dying For?"

[https://www.amazon.com/Journalism-Worth-Dying-Final-
Dispatch...](https://www.amazon.com/Journalism-Worth-Dying-Final-Dispatches-
ebook/dp/B004C43G9C/)

One thing that struck me about the book was how everyone in the Russian system
felt like they had to lie, because no one knew who was in charge.

Members of the Russian government beat, tortured and occasionally killed other
members of the Russian government. Prosecutors eventually became terrified
that if they went after anyone who was well connected, they could end up dead.
Yet it was impossible to know who was well connected. Putin benefitted from
the chaos, he was able to make it work for him. We see this a lot with the
current wave of authoritarianism; leaders are rarely setting themselves up as
absolute rulers like Stalin or Hitler, instead, they are making themselves
invisible, and relying on chaos so they can maintain power. Right now Putin is
fighting for a new Constitution which will make the formal leader of Russia
extremely weak -- but he's planning on handing that role to someone else.
Putin will continue to control things from the background.

Kaczynski, in Poland, is not a rational individual, but he has very much fine
tuned what seems to be the modern model for authoritarian rule. I suspect 25
years from now we will look back and see that Kaczynski's style of rule has
become more frequent than Orban's style of rule. Orban is setting himself up
to be shot down. Kaczynski hides in the background.

~~~
pestaa
I live under the Orban-regime, but not sure I agree with your analysis. His
style of government does not exactly provokes violence -- it incites apathy.

The absolute lack of sophistication in their messaging[0] is turning large
demographics away from politics, and in many cases, the country.

[0]: They explain COVID-19 as an evil plan by George Soros, of course. The
opportunity didn't occur to them for a long time, but the brilliance
prevailed.

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unexaminedlife
One of the things I've started to consider recently. Ironically (or not)
because of the tactics employed by our favorite President #45.

I think it's a much cleaner tactic for powerful people to simply spend plenty
of air time vilifying their enemies and let mentally ill people at the bottom
of the socio-economic ladder do their dirty work.

This way no important people ever come into contact with the terrorist(s), so
they'll always have plausible deniability.

~~~
jacobush
I have heard great things about people over there.

And I think you’re going to win; you've got these Senators, these jobs have
virtually disappeared, an embarrassing commitment to the White House and the
Old Post Office. I couldn’t care – sever ties?” I said, “I can’t believe it.”
The pundits – you know what was going on, they knew exactly, but they’re
mostly made in South Korea’s getting frisky. Right?

------
cafard
Flashback:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles)

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_cs2017_
How do people find confidence to risk their life (and their kids' happiness)
for a cause, when most people around don't care about that cause and seem to
be happy with the status quo?

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zrth
There's a great Podcast by Matthew Caruana Galizia, the son of Daphne &
Tortoise Media.

4 Episodes a ~30min:

[https://share.transistor.fm/s/81b87c83](https://share.transistor.fm/s/81b87c83)

[https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/my-mothers-murder-
epis...](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/my-mothers-murder-
episode-1/id1487320403?i=1000465109736)

------
zrth
The most promising way to prevent politicians and criminals from trying to
censor through killing journalists is to retaliate the killings by
investigating the initiator and their allies until every crime they have
committed has surfaced. As soon as it is clear that a flood of investigations
are consequence of violence against people who speak the truth the risk of
speaking should diminish greatly.

~~~
erdos4d
After having lived in a corrupt country, this will just get you killed. These
people aren't lone actors, they are part of a network of people looking out
for one another. If these sorts of crimes aren't investigated seriously by the
authorities, then they are in fact part of that network and you are really
going after the main power structure in the society. You will need to affect
some sort of revolution to displace that power structure, anything else will
just get you locked up/beat up/killed/or worse.

~~~
zrth
Sometimes investigations can be continued from other countries where silencing
journalists is less feasible.

Example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daphne_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daphne_Project)

------
abrowne
(2018)

