It's dangerous to blow the whistle

By Francis Volpe, August 9, 2005

Bunnatine Greenhouse. Roll that over your tongue for a moment.

No, this isn't the name of a place you go to buy flowers and shrubs. It's a woman employed at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a principal assistant responsible for contracting (PARC).

And she's in big trouble. She's already been demoted once and she's now on a three-month evaluation of a kind that could result in her being fired.

All of this is because she refuses to back down when told to turn a blind eye to the kinds of things a person in her job is supposed to prevent.

In short, she's a whistleblower. She's the kind of person who is often lionized in magazine feature stories and sometimes turned into the subjects of Oscar-winning motion pictures like "The Insider" and "Erin Brockovich."