Thursday, 03/13/03

My copy of The New Yorker traditionally shows up a few days late, so when mom forwarded me the link a few days ago, I hadn't seen the issue with this Seymour Hersh story about Richard Perle, long-time Iraq hawk and chair of the Pentagon-advisory Defense Policy Board, who is ostensibly doing a very good job making a buck while fanning the flames of homeland security. It will not be news to the Tom Tomorrow readers in the audience that Perle is now suing Hersh for libel.

When somebody's willing to take a high-profile libel case to court in the US, the burden of proof is high, and it's (appropriately) difficult enough to prove a case that the plaintiff probably has a substantial gripe, or wouldn't be tilting at windmills.

In Britain, a libel suit is a cheap way to quash speech, because the burden of proof is backward. Recall the David Irving case: when Deborah Lipstadt (an American professor at Emory) wrote a book calling holocaust denier David Irving a holocaust denier, Irving hauled her into court and successfully marshalled the weight of the majestic British legal system to force Lipstadt to prove that the holocaust had happened. Irving lost the case, spectacularly, but he was on solid British legal ground to put the burden of proof on Lipstadt, and the outcome was not a fait accompli.

So it's significant and scary that Perle, not-British, is pursuing his libel case against Hersh, also not-British, in a British court. Thus, the pesky obstacles of American constitutional protections are neatly avoided.

If that doesn't want to make you read the Hersh article for yourself, you're no friend of mine.

It's unsettling that the only stories I can find about this, as of now, are in the New York Sun and in Slate, where Timothy Noah has been following the adventures of Adnan Kashoggi for some time. Use this Google News query for "Perle, Hersh, and libel" to find others, more or less as they happen. If they happen.

Update: Jack Shafer, also in Salon, is skeptical that Perle will actually file (but double-dog dares him to):

Ordinarily newspapers don't consider it news that someone might have "plans" to file a lawsuit. Especially if they plan to file later. In England. All of which explains why no U.S. daily published his threat except the neoconservative New York Sun.

Meanwhile, for a view from the echo chamber, see the blog of David "Axis of evil" Frum. Frum's is the first treatment of this story I've seen with no mention of Perle on CNN a few days ago calling Hersh "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist". Go figure. 04:50PM «

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