I don’t know–maybe James Lynn, a former executive for the Beast of Bentonville, was having some after-hours interaction with a female who worked for him. But, that ‘s a completely different issue than the tale he is now telling: that The Beast’s goods were being produced in Central America by workers who were being abused. No, really? That fine, upstanding corporate citizen is making tons of money while workers suffer? I’m shocked, schocked…

Truth is Lynn may have been, ahem, messing around AND he also could have been doing exactly what he alleges in his lawsuit against the Beast: complaining about substandard conditions at apparel facilities in Central America, complaints, he claims, that lead to Wal-Mart canning him.

According to the story in The New York Times, several of Lynn’s monitoring reports “noted that factories in Honduras pad-locked exits, lacked drinking water, did not have toilet paper and did not pay overtime to some employees.” Lynn is suing the Beast over his firing.

But, there’s a much deeper story here, as the National Labor Committee has discovered. One April 2002 e-mail from Lynn to a higher-up at the Beast shows that there were serious concerns about the treatment of workers in Guatemala–yet apparently Wal-Mart buried those concerns.

And, as the NLC shows, there’s a much deeper pattern of the Beast’s exploitation of workers in Central America. It has done an extensive interview with a different Wal-Mart whistleblower.

So, again, the Beast tries to change the subject, attacking an individual on some personal transgression, true or false, in order to obscure it’s appalling treatment of workers.

Interesting, though, how this story only comes to light in the Times AFTER the vote yesterday in the Senate on CAFTA…