NEW YORK, Dec 22: Time Magazine named a trio of women whistle-blowers as its Persons of the Year on Sunday, praising their roles in unearthing malfeasance that eroded public confidence in their institutions.

Two of the women, Sherron Watkins, a vice president at Enron Corp., and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom Inc.,uncovered massive accounting fraud at their respective companies, both of which went bankrupt.

The third, Coleen Rowley, is an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In May, she wrote a scathing 13-page memo to FBI Director Robert Muller detailing how supervisors at a Minneapolis, Minnesota field office brushed aside her requests to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker” in the Sept. 11th attacks, weeks before the attacks occurred.

“It came down to did we want to recognize a phenomenon that helped correct some of the problems we’ve had over the last year and celebrate three ordinary people that did extraordinary things,” said Time managing editor Jim Kelly.

Other people considered by the magazine, which hits stores on Monday, included US President George W. Bush, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Vice President Dick Cheney and New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer.

Bush was seen by some as the front-runner, especially after he led his party to a mid-term electoral upset in November that cemented the party’s majority in Congress.

However, Kelly said “some of (Bush’s) own goals: the capture of Osama bin Laden, the unseating of Saddam Hussein, the revival of a sluggish economy, haven’t happened yet. There was a sense of bigger things to come, and it might be wise to see how things played out,” he added.

Watkins, 43, is a former accountant best known for a blunt, prescient 7-page memo to Enron chairman Kenneth Lay in 2001 that uncovered questionable accounting and warned that the company could “implode in a wave of accounting scandals.”

Her letter came to light during a post-mortem inquiry conducted by Congress after the company declared bankruptcy.

Cooper undertook a one-woman crusade inside telecommunications behemoth WorldCom, when she discovered that the company had disguised $3.8 billion in losses through improper accounting.

When the scandal came to light in June after the company declared bankruptcy, jittery investors laid siege to global stock markets.

FBI agent and lawyer Rowley’s secret memo was leaked to the press in May. Weeks before Sept. 11, Rowley suspected Moussaoui might have ties to radical activities and Osama, and she asked supervisors for clearance to search his computer.

Her letter sharply criticized the agency’s hidebound culture and its decision-makers, and gave rise to new inquiries over the intelligence-gathering failures of Sept. 11.—Reuters