http://www.registerguard.com/news/2006/03/03/ed.col.millegan.0303.p1.php?section=opinion
GUEST VIEWPOINT
Free speech flattened by steamroller
By Kris Millegan
Published: Friday, March 3, 2006
The trial had an over-the-top unreality about it, and as I watched the plaintiffs' lawyers trying to pull the patriotic wool over jurors' eyes, the paucity of their case became more apparent.
Why was I in a federal courtroom in South Carolina?
I was just a small fry from up the McKenzie River near Walterville. My company, TrineDay, had published the book "Expendable Elite - One Soldier's Journey Into Covert Warfare," a memoir of a CIA-directed operation in Vietnam written by a retired lieutenant colonel who had served with the U.S. Special Forces. The author and my company had been sued for libel, and the whole lawsuit was ludicrous.
The jury agreed. It took members only about two hours Jan. 30 - just long enough to eat lunch and fill out multiple forms - to come back with the verdict of innocent.
We had libeled no one. We had presented evidence of the truth of the matter, and with these facts in evidence there was no libel.
We had called the plaintiffs heroes. If anything, the book castigated American political leadership for putting America's fighting forces in the militarily untenable situation of being exposed to harassment and attack from inviolate "enemy sanctuaries."
Yet win or lose, the lawsuit was chilling - and ruinously expensive. That was its intent.
The lawsuit was a "steamroller" operation - which is spook slang for an attempt to cover up history, deny questionable activities and flatten opposition to the official story. The Special Forces Association, a fraternal organization of retired and active Special Forces personnel, financed the lawsuit, obtained the lawyers and even paid the plaintiffs' trial expen-ses.
The association has carried the ball on similar steamroller operations, operations in which our true history is covered up by official denials, obfuscations and political lies.
Let's review a few of them.
"Special Forces don't talk to reporters, and reporters don't talk to Special Forces." That was the direct message delivered to a member of a CNN news crew that reported a covert U.S. military operation in Laos during the Vietnam "police action." The story was part of a broadcast on the secret warfare activities of the Studies and Observations Group, an elite commando unit of the Army's Special Forces.
CNN Producers April Oliver, Jack Smith and their news crew had spent eight months on the story, lining up interviews ranging from the grunts on the ground all the way up to Adm. Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Interference to suppress the news story included pressure on CNN board members by Henry Kissinger, a threatened boycott of CNN by veteran groups and an alleged threat to freeze out CNN from Department of Defense background briefings.
After being fired from CNN, members of that news team have won judgments arising out of the litigation surrounding the affair - and stand by their story today.
Another steamroller operation: Last year in New York, I had lunch with international attorney and author William Pepper, an associate of Martin Luther King Jr. Pepper prevailed in a 1999 court case that showed that there was a conspiracy - including "governmental agencies" - involved in the King assassination, discrediting the official "lone assassin" theory.
I had to chuckle when Pepper urbanely told me, "You know, I can get on the `Today Show' any time I want, as long as I do not talk about my books about the King case." Almost seven years after the jury's verdict, few have heard of Pepper's works.
How free is our national discourse when authors aren't allowed to speak, and when publishers can face bankrupting and ludicrous lawsuits for printing our history?
Many of us think (as I did, before my recent episode) that if you defend yourself in a civil case and win, the other side must pay your attorneys. Sadly, that is not the case. But this isn't about court reform. This is about our ability to understand and discuss our own history.
The Bush administration is currently removing thousands of historical National Archives documents from the public - some of which have been on college library shelves for years - and reclassifying them. Listen to historian Matthew Aid, who blew the whistle last December on the seven-year-long secret program when he discovered documents from the Korean War and others missing:
"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed. Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."
Why all the secrecy and subterfuge, even to the extent of trying to stop books? If we were ignorant of our history, would it, perhaps, be easier to lead us deceptively along to a future of paying for and fighting in an unreasoned continual war?
Well, perhaps.
It has been said that, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
I do not know about you, but I'd rather, perhaps, not.
Kris Millegan of Walterville is publisher of TrineDay Press.
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