8 ms·

Who ordered the car bomb that killed Maltese journalist Daphne Galizia? (2018)

268 points by tslocum 7y ago

Hokusai 7y ago
> "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 7y ago
  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?
  - chaps 7y ago
    This is a very, very HN comment.
  - numakerg 7y ago
    > 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 7y ago
      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.
  - gorgoiler 7y ago
    I’m not arguing either way but would point out: 1/ Drawing a salary is profit sharing. 2/ Keeping your job is a reward.
    - vageli 7y ago
      > I’m not arguing either way but would point out: > 1/ Drawing a salary is profit sharing. People still get paid when companies don't turn a profit.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Salary is a maximally derisked profit sharing scheme. You get much less money that you could've earned in times of company's success, in exchange for a stable income even if the company is not successful.
      - gorgoiler 7y ago
        It feels like we’re splitting hairs a little. In the context of my comment on the parent, profit and revenue are the same thing. After all, if you share 100% of your profit in another sense your company makes no profit at the end of the year. The point is: once your livelihood depends on being part of an organisation, your judgement about that org can’t be completely impartial.
  - watwut 7y ago
    Another way to reward loyalty to ethically challenged manager: promotion, more interesting projects, public praise, not abusing you like the others and so on.
  - Renaud 7y ago
    That's a pretty narrow definition of loyalty. You are assuming that it's just a thing bought with money. You can be loyal to the values that your company represent or the values you expect it to hold. A company that behaves callously doesn't reflect well on the employees that represent it. These employees may have higher expectations of what their company behaviour should be. You don't need to reward people with money for them to defend that.
- unexaminedlife 7y ago
  I think loyalty is the root of all corruption. If it's not it's pretty close.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    There is also self-serving corruption. Loyalty is required for any systematic, organised, group-based corruption, however. Typology of corruption: http://corruptioncontrol.com/Types_of_Corruption.html http://corruptioncontrol.com/Types_of_Corruption.html
  - harry8 7y ago
    And fear based discipline. Whistle-blower retaliation. And that, right there, is why the hideously corrupt hate Wikileaks so so much. Wikileaks publish. Always. Their reputation on it is rock solid. If you're corrupt or involved in a cover up you gotta hate that. And do everything to destroy it.
    - MagnumOpus 7y ago
      Wikileaks was like that before it got infiltrated in 2016. Then it changed rapidly, not publishing when it does not serve Russian interests. One very prominent example: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-leaks-on-russian-government-during-u-s-presidential-campaign/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
      - fit2rule 7y ago
        This is such utter nonsense. How can any honest intellectual consider this to be anything other than the result of a calculated agitprop campaign by the utterly corrupt US military industrial complex .. Assange is not a Russian agent, and Wikileaks is not a Russian operation, and never was. It just so happens that the majority of dire, desperate corruption that Wikileaks revealed, was indeed committed by Western entities. This does not mean that Russia doesn't have its problems - but it has not committed war crimes and other very real crimes against humanity at anything near the scale of the criminal Western war coalition and the member 5-eyes nations. Please, inform yourself as to the nature of the very real agitprop campaign that has been waged against Wikileaks, and in so doing - have the courage to see Assange for the hero he really is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgw6FoFPhjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgw6FoFPhjo
abrowne 7y ago
(2018)
jph 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    Those who tell the truth shall die, those who tell the truth shall live forever. (name of an album by postrock band Explosions in the Sky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3H8y4ohO-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3H8y4ohO-s)
  - lkrubner 7y ago
    I just got done reading "Is Journalism Worth Dying For?" https://www.amazon.com/Journalism-Worth-Dying-Final-Dispatches-ebook/dp/B004C43G9C/ https://www.amazon.com/Journalism-Worth-Dying-Final-Dispatch... 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.
cafard 7y ago
Flashback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles
unexaminedlife 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- chance_state 7y ago
  https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/stochastic_terrorism https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/stochastic_terrorism
zrth 7y ago
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-episode-1/id1487320403?i=1000465109736 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/my-mothers-murder-epis...
zrth 7y ago
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.
- lstamour 7y ago
  That can be difficult to do depending on the context. Mexico comes to mind. Criminals can use both fear and loyalty to make it harder to prove crimes and if politicians are involved, they can easily threaten other politicians or even the legal system itself. This isn’t to say that the approach won’t work, long-term de-escalating violence, increasing controls in arms trade, and asserting the rule of law above any individual are all viable. It’s getting the existing gangs and political systems to change their ways that is harder. It’s also worth pointing out that a justice system based on evidence can still serve unjust sentences, make mistakes. And politicians write the laws the system enforces. And many places don’t have free speech and human rights upheld to such an extent that laws can’t easily be written to curb it. So it’s a complicated problem... I’d even start by saying Panama Papers highlights a problem that you can have anonymous “persons” making transactions that are untraceable, etc. And countries and businesses can profit off this, and there isn’t agreement as to when privacy is worth more or less than free speech or when profit is valued more or less than security.
  - zrth 7y ago
    True, Mexico is quite ruff. It's hard to even guess where to start from and what to do.. Maybe go after the people who are responsible for selling the weapons and laundering the money? E.g. US based weapons manufacturers and German banks? There are countries that are not as hopeless where I can see potential for change, or so it seems at least: https://www.dw.com/en/murder-of-jan-kuciak-13-judges-arrested-in-slovakia/a-52725355 https://www.dw.com/en/murder-of-jan-kuciak-13-judges-arreste...
- tialaramex 7y ago
_cs2017_ 7y ago
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?
zzzzer 7y ago
Meanwhile in Malta : "Daphne Caruana Galizia Memorial Site Pelted With Eggs And Doused In Tomato Sauce" https://lovinmalta.com/news/daphne-caruana-galizia-memorial-site-pelted-with-eggs-and-doused-in-tomato-sauce/ https://lovinmalta.com/news/daphne-caruana-galizia-memorial-...
qubex 7y ago
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.

268 points by tslocum 7y ago

> "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 7y ago
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?
- chaps 7y ago
  This is a very, very HN comment.
- numakerg 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    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.
- gorgoiler 7y ago
  I’m not arguing either way but would point out: 1/ Drawing a salary is profit sharing. 2/ Keeping your job is a reward.
  - vageli 7y ago
    > I’m not arguing either way but would point out: > 1/ Drawing a salary is profit sharing. People still get paid when companies don't turn a profit.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Salary is a maximally derisked profit sharing scheme. You get much less money that you could've earned in times of company's success, in exchange for a stable income even if the company is not successful.
    - gorgoiler 7y ago
      It feels like we’re splitting hairs a little. In the context of my comment on the parent, profit and revenue are the same thing. After all, if you share 100% of your profit in another sense your company makes no profit at the end of the year. The point is: once your livelihood depends on being part of an organisation, your judgement about that org can’t be completely impartial.
- watwut 7y ago
  Another way to reward loyalty to ethically challenged manager: promotion, more interesting projects, public praise, not abusing you like the others and so on.
- Renaud 7y ago
  That's a pretty narrow definition of loyalty. You are assuming that it's just a thing bought with money. You can be loyal to the values that your company represent or the values you expect it to hold. A company that behaves callously doesn't reflect well on the employees that represent it. These employees may have higher expectations of what their company behaviour should be. You don't need to reward people with money for them to defend that.
unexaminedlife 7y ago
I think loyalty is the root of all corruption. If it's not it's pretty close.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  There is also self-serving corruption. Loyalty is required for any systematic, organised, group-based corruption, however. Typology of corruption: http://corruptioncontrol.com/Types_of_Corruption.html http://corruptioncontrol.com/Types_of_Corruption.html
- harry8 7y ago
  And fear based discipline. Whistle-blower retaliation. And that, right there, is why the hideously corrupt hate Wikileaks so so much. Wikileaks publish. Always. Their reputation on it is rock solid. If you're corrupt or involved in a cover up you gotta hate that. And do everything to destroy it.
  - MagnumOpus 7y ago
    Wikileaks was like that before it got infiltrated in 2016. Then it changed rapidly, not publishing when it does not serve Russian interests. One very prominent example: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-leaks-on-russian-government-during-u-s-presidential-campaign/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
    - fit2rule 7y ago
      This is such utter nonsense. How can any honest intellectual consider this to be anything other than the result of a calculated agitprop campaign by the utterly corrupt US military industrial complex .. Assange is not a Russian agent, and Wikileaks is not a Russian operation, and never was. It just so happens that the majority of dire, desperate corruption that Wikileaks revealed, was indeed committed by Western entities. This does not mean that Russia doesn't have its problems - but it has not committed war crimes and other very real crimes against humanity at anything near the scale of the criminal Western war coalition and the member 5-eyes nations. Please, inform yourself as to the nature of the very real agitprop campaign that has been waged against Wikileaks, and in so doing - have the courage to see Assange for the hero he really is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgw6FoFPhjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgw6FoFPhjo

abrowne 7y ago

(2018)

jph 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  Those who tell the truth shall die, those who tell the truth shall live forever. (name of an album by postrock band Explosions in the Sky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3H8y4ohO-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3H8y4ohO-s)
- lkrubner 7y ago
  I just got done reading "Is Journalism Worth Dying For?" https://www.amazon.com/Journalism-Worth-Dying-Final-Dispatches-ebook/dp/B004C43G9C/ https://www.amazon.com/Journalism-Worth-Dying-Final-Dispatch... 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.

cafard 7y ago

Flashback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles

unexaminedlife 7y ago

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 7y ago
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?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
chance_state 7y ago
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/stochastic_terrorism https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/stochastic_terrorism

zrth 7y ago

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

zrth 7y ago

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.

lstamour 7y ago
That can be difficult to do depending on the context. Mexico comes to mind. Criminals can use both fear and loyalty to make it harder to prove crimes and if politicians are involved, they can easily threaten other politicians or even the legal system itself. This isn’t to say that the approach won’t work, long-term de-escalating violence, increasing controls in arms trade, and asserting the rule of law above any individual are all viable. It’s getting the existing gangs and political systems to change their ways that is harder. It’s also worth pointing out that a justice system based on evidence can still serve unjust sentences, make mistakes. And politicians write the laws the system enforces. And many places don’t have free speech and human rights upheld to such an extent that laws can’t easily be written to curb it. So it’s a complicated problem... I’d even start by saying Panama Papers highlights a problem that you can have anonymous “persons” making transactions that are untraceable, etc. And countries and businesses can profit off this, and there isn’t agreement as to when privacy is worth more or less than free speech or when profit is valued more or less than security.
- zrth 7y ago
  True, Mexico is quite ruff. It's hard to even guess where to start from and what to do.. Maybe go after the people who are responsible for selling the weapons and laundering the money? E.g. US based weapons manufacturers and German banks? There are countries that are not as hopeless where I can see potential for change, or so it seems at least: https://www.dw.com/en/murder-of-jan-kuciak-13-judges-arrested-in-slovakia/a-52725355 https://www.dw.com/en/murder-of-jan-kuciak-13-judges-arreste...
tialaramex 7y ago

_cs2017_ 7y ago

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?

zzzzer 7y ago

Meanwhile in Malta : "Daphne Caruana Galizia Memorial Site Pelted With Eggs And Doused In Tomato Sauce" https://lovinmalta.com/news/daphne-caruana-galizia-memorial-site-pelted-with-eggs-and-doused-in-tomato-sauce/ https://lovinmalta.com/news/daphne-caruana-galizia-memorial-...

qubex 7y ago

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.