OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: "Mr. Fitz, in your threat to sue for libel, please, either put up or shut up"

Consider the recklessness of that statement in the context of the libel standard that all journalists live by: the rule set forth in the landmark Supreme Court case, New York Times vs. Sullivan.

In order to mount a successful defamation claim "Times vs. Sullivan," requires a public official like Fitzgerald to demonstrate "a reckless disregard for the truth," or "actual malice."

Fitzgerald would be hard pressed to clear that hurdle, since the hardcover edition of Triple Cross ran 604 pages, with 1,420 end notes and 32 pages of documentary appendices including a series of FBI 302 memos and a 1999 affirmation sworn to by Fitzgerald himself.

If you have any doubts about the depth of my research, termed "meticulous" in a recent piece for Forbes.com, you can download a pdf of the illustrated Timeline from the middle of the book, along with those Appendices which include some heretofore classified documents.

Yet in his 20 month campaign to kill the book, Fitzgerald crossed the threshold of libel himself. In a June 8th interview with the Associated Press, he falsely claimed that I blamed him in Triple Cross for the mass casualties on 9/11 and the African Embassy bombings:

"The book lied about the facts and alleged that I deliberately misled the courts and the public in ways that in part caused the deaths in the 1998 embassy bombing attacks and in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." Fitzgerald said the lives lost in those attacks were personal for him and he decided to stand up for himself because "it is outrageous to falsely accuse me of causing those deaths corruptly."

A simple reading of Triple Cross in its hardcover edition will offer proof positive that I never even came close to making such a claim. But that comment, along with Fitzgerald's "lie masquerading as the truth" line suggested the same reckless disregard for the truth that I was accused of by the Chicago U.S. Attorney.

A JUSTICE DEPT. COMPLAINT VS. FITZGERALD

So on June 15th, I filed a complaint against Fitzgerald with the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, asking acting counsel Mary Patrice Brown to open what amounts to an internal affairs investigation of Fitzgerald and his drive to pulp my book.

An examination of Fitzie's 32 pages of threat letters suggests that if he actually wrote them himself he must have spent days, perhaps even weeks, trying to bury Triple Cross. If he used one of the 161 lawyers in the Chicago federal prosecutor's office, that raises even more serious questions.

Since word of the Fitzgerald censorship scandal broke I've had the support of a number of First Amendment and anti-censorship advocates including The Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, Nat Hentoff, the Ã©minence gris of The Village Voice, who wrote his last column in January, and Jan Schlichtmann, the gusty tort lawyer celebrated in Jonathan Harr's 1995 best seller, "A Civil Action."

"What Patrick Fitzgerald, tried to do, in attempting to shut down this book, was repugnant," says Schlitchtmann. "It represented a virtually unprecedented attempt by a sitting U.S. official to kill a book critical of his performance in office. Fitzgerald had to know he didn't have a libel claim, yet for months and months he tried to force HarperCollins and Peter Lance to knuckle under to his demands something they refused to do."

So far, online columnists on the right and the left, who might otherwise have cut each other's throats, have been universal in their support for Triple Cross's publication.

See: columns from Newsmax, WorldNetDaily, Accuracy in Media and The New American on the right to The Daily Kos, the rawstory.com and thepublicrecord.com on the left. Rory O'Connor's piece for The Huffington Post was entitled: "Patrick Fitzgerald's Private Jihad."

THE CHILLING EFFECT

In an article I wrote for playboy.com, published June 16th, I detailed the kind of '''Chilling Effect," Fitzgerald sought to achieve with HarperCollins. In the piece I presented evidence that in discrediting a treasure trove of al Qaeda-related intelligence in 1996 (underscored by his June 25th, 1999 sworn affirmation) Fitzgerald himself might have been guilty of the very same perjury and obstruction charges he used to convict Scooter Libby in "Plamegate."

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