For Hussein, the truth remains muddied
Monday, Apr. 28, 2008 @ 11:05 pm
Some puddles, when stomped in, never clear up. The silt mingles with the water and nothing is clear until the water disappears.
This newspaper has been following the Hussein S. Hussein case since 2005. For newcomers, this is the rough breakdown: Hussein, who was fired this month, unveiled animal neglect on the university’s research farms. Fifty-six U.S. Department of Agriculture violations came from Hussein’s whistle-blowing.
He has also sued the university at least a dozen times: administrators, graduate students, post-doctoral workers and other faculty members. A 124-page complaint, the longest of his suits, lists 46 defendants.
Hussein is also the most vocal about these scatter-shot lawsuits and their corresponding complaints. He says administrators have made racist comments, outright threatened him and intimidated other potential dissenters. The administrators would naturally deny these damning claims – we can’t prove them, either.
But other claims rightfully raise eyebrows: that he’s been subjected to a long war of retaliation for revealing animal abuse, unfair yearly evaluations and administrators attempting to intimidate him by using his name to pique the FBI’s curiosity.
Again, the administrators would naturally deny these damning claims. And all we can do is let the facts speak for themselves.
We’re not interested in taking sides, just the truth. Maybe the administration is, or at least was under President John Lilley, a bullying “mafia family,” as Hussein has said. Or maybe Hussein is the “quintessential disgruntled employee,” as university-hired law firm McDonald, Carano, Wilson and the Nevada System of Higher Education lawyers claim.
Either way, the puddle has been stomped.
Neither side is clean and neither side wants to lose. Any lawsuit is war and the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to this one. The two sides trade blows and have been accused of fighting dirty. The public, journalists and the truth get the crossfire.
We exist to bring truth to the public but that’s impossible when one side bombards reporters with information and the other more or less refuses to talk, citing “personnel issues.” As a result, we don’t even know the whole truth – just bits and pieces of one of the strangest stories to ever strike this university.
In time and in trial, we only hope the whole truth comes out. We’re just curious to know who did the stomping.
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