Sadly, the sole purpose of an HR dept. is to keep a company from getting sued. The bigger the company, the more that's their sole focus.

This guy admitting anything but the most perfect of environments and purity of process, while not a firing offense to normal folk, opened a vector for the possibility of the hint of something bad being done. So he had to go.

Yeah they do, but it's a tough situation for everyone. If the HR person didn't fire Mr. X, someone else more opportunistic and less scrupulous would've done it - and the original HR guy's head would've rolled with Mr. X's.

Things like this will keep happening so long as we're willing to trample all over each other in our race to the "top".

Bureaucrats don't want passion, they want repeatability - see Robin's new post about sports rules http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/sports-signals.html.