http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/12/18/f1.bz.publisher.1218.p1.php?section=business
Battle For A War Story: Soldiers association sues independent publisher over Vietnam book
BY KAREN MCCOWAN
The Register-Guard
Published: Sunday, December 18, 2005
WALTERVILLE - A tiny publishing house here is in the cross-hairs of a $700,000 lawsuit backed by the Special Forces Association, a fraternal organization for current and former U.S. military special operatives.
On the one side are Kris Millegan's Trine Day Press and one of its authors, retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Daniel Marvin, who have been targeted in the case. On the other are seven men who served with Marvin in Vietnam during 1966 and 1967.
They contend that Marvin's book "Expendable Elite: One Soldier's Journey Into Covert Warfare," provided a "false, libelous, defamatory, embarrassing and humiliating" account of their activities at An Phu near the Cambodian border. They seek $100,000 each in general, special and punitive damages.
Millegan said the case already has racked up nearly $50,000 in legal expenses, and it could bankrupt his small press, which has published just eight books and sold a total of 40,000 copies since its creation four years ago.
But he declined to agree to the men's demand that he reissue the book as a work of fiction. He stands by Marvin's account, saying that some of the defendants verified it on tape at Marvin's request after he sent them early drafts in 1988.
``I have audio tapes from the people who are now suing me, not only confirming Col. Marvin's story, but saying he could use their names,'' Millegan said.
His willingness to challenge the lawsuit has won admiration from other small, independent publishers, said Teresa Kao, owner of Our Town Publishing in Portland and former president of the Northwest Association of Book Publishers.
``Small publishers typically can't afford to carry liability insurance," Kao said. "If someone decides to sue you, there just isn't money for this sort of thing.
``Too often you see people say, `I'll take this book off the market if you'll make this lawsuit go away,' " Kao said. "But Kris sees this really as a kind of quest. He is just going ahead with it because he believes it needs to be done.''
A South Carolina U.S. District Court jury began hearing the case on Halloween day, but a mistrial was declared two days later after one of the plaintiffs' attorneys suffered a medical emergency.
Judge David Norton has scheduled a new trial to begin Jan. 23.
In their opening statement, the plaintiff's attorneys, Ben and Bobby Deaver, acknowledged the audio tapes, but say their clients thought they were being asked to "vet" a work of fiction.
At particular issue are Marvin's contention that he was assigned to assassinate Cambodian Crown Prince Norodum Sihanouk; that he commanded some of the men in an operation that involved firing into neutral Cambodia (which the plaintiffs say would have been a violation of international law); and that the men supported Marvin's refusal of a direct order to leave An Phu (which they contend would have constituted mutiny). In Marvin's account, the defiance was to protect their partners in the mission, a local militant Buddhist sect.
``Tame'' by comparison
"Expendable Elite" is hardly the most outrageous book in Trine Day's list.
"It's tame compared to a lot of the stuff I publish," Millegan said.
Consider "Sinister Forces," which ties the Salem witch trials, the Manson murders, the CIA and the Kennedy assassinations to a Satanic plot. Or "Fleshing Out Skull and Bones," which links the Yale secret society - whose members include President Bush and Sen. John Kerry - to world-wide drug smuggling.
Before the first trial was aborted, Millegan acknowledged under questioning by the plaintiff's attorneys that he had published "Expendable Elite" only after it had been rejected by more than 100 other publishers.
They also elicited testimony that he believes a CIA "Operation Mockingbird" had infiltrated the U.S. news media and publishing houses to prevent would-be whistle blowers from alerting the public.
In court, Ben Deaver presented a very different picture of the An Phu activities of clients William B. Tuttle Jr., Raymond J. Johnson, George H. Kuchen, John E. Strait, Richard Sirois, William Menkins and James A. Taylor than that of the book.
He described the outpost as a "pacified area" where the men did civil affairs work building schools, infrastructure and providing medical treatment.
Why then, did some of them send affirmative written or tape recorded feedback to Marvin's manuscript?
They respected him as a former commander, Bobby Deaver told the jury in his opening statement. ``And then, because they thought this was a novel, a couple of them said, `Yeah, you can use my name if you want to.' "
The Deavers also submitted a deposition from Tuttle, Marvin's former superior officer, now too medically fragile to testify in court. In it, Tuttle denies the covert operation Marvin describes, saying, ``I didn't even have authority to authorize anything like that.''
It's not surprising he would say that, Marvin testified in reply. When he accepted the mission, he said, he was told the Air Force would deny knowledge of it. Marvin said he only broke his own promised silence because his conscience bothered him after a religious conversion.
``In 1984, I came to know the Lord as my personal savior,'' he said. ``And that day is the day I started writing this book. Because I no longer feared the company sending somebody like me, a trained assassin, to kill me for telling the truth.''
Fighting over the truth
In some respects, the clean-cut, born-again Christian Air Force veteran is an odd bedfellow for Millegan, a pony-tailed "old hippie" and one-time guitarist with the band ``Powertrain.''
Millegan operates out of an old farmhouse and barn not far from the Walterville store.
He considers, researches and edits the manuscripts while outside contractors handle design, copy editing, printing and distribution.
He works in an attic office stuffed to the rafters with books about U.S. history, military operations and spy agencies.
He displays old photographs that appear to verify his story of growing up in Fairfax, Va., and Indonesia while his father served as CIA branch chief for Southeast Asia.
``Dad didn't tell us about it then,'' he said. ``But he told me in 1969, when I was 19, that the Vietnam War wasn't about fighting communism, but about protecting access to drugs, and that these secret societies were behind it all. I thought he was nuts, that this was his way of having a `drug talk' with me.''
Millegan began to seriously examine his father's claim, however, after hearing revisionist historian D.F. Fleming talk about the origins of the Cold War. He began his own research into allegations of CIA and Skull and Bones Society involvement with drug-running.
By the 1990s, he had decided to make a mission of exposing secret societies and agencies.
"Their secrecy and our Republic don't mix," he said.
With this lawsuit, however, he's having to put his money where his mouth is. After two profitable years, legal expenses have pushed Trine Day into the red, he said. Fortunately, he isn't literally betting the farm where he lives with his wife and children: The property is owned by members of her family.
Kao, the Portland publisher, said she believes the Special Forces Association simply wants to "cut off the flow of information."
"They've intimidated much bigger fish," she said. "The message is, don't mess with them, or they'll go after you."
Indeed, in its first letter to Millegan threatening legal action in August 2003, the Special Forces Association referred him to Time/Warner or CNN, should he doubt the group's "resolve when the truthfulness of U.S. Special Forces combat operations is at stake."
The letter referred to the association's swift and vociferous response to a 1998 CNN/Time magazine report alleging that the U.S. military used nerve gas to kill American defectors in Laos in another Vietnam-era mission known as Operation Tailwind.
The group's protests and those of Pentagon officials led the television station and magazine to retract the story and fire the reporters and producers involved.
Roger Simmons, who represented fired, award-winning, CNN producer April Oliver, charged last month that the network caved to pressure that it would lose crucial access to Pentagon officials unless it disavowed the story, and that no one has yet proved in court that the story was false.
``So far, the only court decision that's looked at that case has exonerated their reporting,'' he said.
In its official retraction, CNN said the original report came from personnel involved in the Tailwind Operation, but that a subsequent independent investigation led by media attorney Floyd Abrams concluded that the story ``cannot be supported.''
In the "Expendable Elite" lawsuit, even the judge seemed to expect that there would soon be a court decision about the truth or falsehood of the story.
While discussing a new trial after declaring the mistrial last month, Norton noted that neither Marvin nor Trine Day have deep enough pockets to pay the damages sought by the Special Forces Association plaintiffs.
``If you got a verdict, they've got no money,'' Norton told Deaver after declaring the mistrial last month.
``So looks like to me we're trying this case over who's telling the truth.''
=====
http://www.expendableelite.com/lawsuit1/index.html
Lt. Colonel Marvin-TrineDay Legal Defense Fund
Dear Friends and believers in the right to publish the TRUTH: We Need You!!
We Are Two Against the Special Forces Association and we are literally Fighting For Our Survival!!
Harassment lawsuit threatens to bankrupt small publisher and silence a citizen's First Amendment Rights.
We owe our attorneys approximately $30,000 for what they have done thus far, we are close to bankruptcy, have paid them approx. $35,000 to date and anticipate another $60 - $100 thousand to finish litigation. The Special Forces Association wants Marvin's book off the market and want to ruin Marvin & TrineDay financially so that they may no longer author or publish the truth about covert operations.
Please Help Us!! We are just regular folk, already stretched thin.
72 Year-Old Lt. Col. "Dangerous Dan" Marvin and TrineDay, an Oregon publishing house, are defending themselves in a costly legal battle to exercise their first amendment rights that began in Federal District Court in Charleston, SC on October 31, 2005. On Wednesday, November 2, a mistrial was declared. The plaintiffs lead attorney bizarrely disappeared from the courthouse the day before and admitted himself to a local hospital. The trial is rescheduled for January 2006. On trial is Col. Marvin and his book, Expendable Elite – One Soldier’s Journey Into Covert Warfare: a Vietnam wartime story of his experience commanding an independent Special Forces operation in 1966 in the district of An Phu among the Hoa Haos (Wha Hows), a militant Buddhist sect. The book was written in 1988 and published in 2003 by TrineDay.
The Special Forces Association (SFA), a fraternal organization of active and retired operatives has tried to brashly influence these legal proceedings. The SFA has bankrolled the plaintiff's action, supplying lawyers, and apparently even advancing expense money to the plaintiffs. The SFA has a history of "steamrolling" other historical revelations. Any one who reads this book will know they are laying down a smoke screen, hoping to convince a jury that what they say is true and that the book is a lie. But the book is true, based on personal recollections, government documents and third parties and by corroboration by certain of the plaintiffs themselves who now try to disavow the truth. The book was well researched by the publisher and of course sets forth the true accounts of Col. Marvin. This lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to keep secret what the public should know.
You can help us as we fight for the survival of the truth by writing a check to our "Marvin/TrineDay Defense Fund", and mailing it to P.O. Box 577, Walterville, Oregon 97489 or by donating through either PayPal, the Amazon Honor system.You can also help by buying a book or two, and/or by placing a link to this page on your website. Our store website was severely hacked (which has disrupted our sales) but we have in its place a pay pal version. Priority USPS 3- Day shipping has been added to the price of the books.
You may also order a signed book direct from the author, donate or ask any questions
Call Kris at 1-800-556-2012 or Dangerous Dan at 315-655-3053. Signed books are available at either source.
Thank-you. And may God bless you and yours.
Kris Millegan LTC Daniel Marvin
TrineDay Retired Green Beret & author of Expendable Elite
You may donate to our Legal Defense Fund through PayPal here,
OR, through the
Amazon Honor System,
Please help us survive these attacks so they can continue to get this important information out to those who seek it.
Send checks or money orders to:
Marvin-TrineDay Legal Defense Fund
P.O. Box 577
Walterville,OR 97489
Make your checks or money orders payable to Marvin-TrineDay Legal Defense Fund. Thank-you!!!
We sincerely appreciate your help in this effort,
Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Marvin, U.S. Army Special Forces (Retired), Author,
and
Robert A. (Kris) Millegan, Publisher, TrineDay Press www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
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