My old Newsweek nemesis, executive editor Maynard Parker, ordered up hit pieces on Ben-Menashe and the October Surprise allegations, while Emerson was given free rein in the neocon New Republic and the Wall Street Journal to smear anyone close to the investigation.
On the same weekend in November 1991, Newsweek and The New Republic published matching debunking stories, which touted the same supposed alibi for Reagan's campaign director William Casey for a key day in late July 1980 when another witness, Iranian businessman Jamshid Hashemi, had placed him in Madrid for a meeting with senior Iranians.
It later was shown that the Newsweek/New Republic alibi was bogus -- the two magazines had misread a document and had failed to do follow-up interviews that would have shown that Casey wasn't where the magazines placed him -- but the momentum of the debunking campaign was overpowering.
Successful Demonizing
In the early 1990s, the modern Internet did not exist. So, my primary defense of our Frontline investigation had to be made through letters to the editor, which were usually ignored or bowdlerized, with Emerson or others then allowed to write more lies about me and others.
For instance, in one counterattack, Emerson and his co-author, Jesse Furman, wrote that Ben-Menashe had been "denied a special security clearance because he was deemed "delusional,'" showing without any skepticism that the Israelis, who had already been caught lying about Ben-Menashe, might be lying again. And what would a supposedly low-level translator need with a "special security clearance"?
Emerson also implied that I had lied in the Frontline documentary when I reported that Secret Service records, which had been released regarding George H.W. Bush's whereabouts on a key weekend in October 1980, included a number of redactions (or deletions).
Emerson insisted that the Secret Service had responded to his Freedom of Information Act request by sending him completely unredacted copies, i.e. with nothing covered up. When I informed his editors that the Secret Service was dismissing Emerson's claim as a lie -- saying that his copies also had redactions -- Emerson responded by threatening a libel suit against me if I didn't recant and apologize.
Operating behind a phalanx of pricy lawyers, Emerson forced me to dig in to my children's college fund to defend myself. After a long and expensive standoff, I submitted an FOIA for Emerson's FOIA, getting from the Secret Service exactly what had been given to him.
Emerson's copies turned out to have been redacted, too, just like those given to everyone else, finally forcing Emerson to admit that he never had the documents he had claimed to have.
Emerson's use of lawyers to bully other journalists became part of his modus operandi, as Nation reporter Robert I. Friedman discovered in 1995 after criticizing Emerson's "Jihad in America" documentary.
"Intellectual terrorism seems to be part of Emerson's standard repertoire," Friedman wrote. "So is his penchant for papering his critics with threatening lawyers' letters."
Ironically, Friedman reported that Emerson hosted right-wing Israeli intelligence officials when they were in Washington.
"[Yigal] Carmon, who was Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's adviser on terrorism, and [Yoram] Ettinger, who was Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu's man in the Israeli Embassy, stay in Emerson's apartment on their frequent visits to Washington," Friedman wrote.
Questions about objectivity also arose around Newsweek's October Surprise debunking article. Not only was the magazine's key alibi for Casey shown to be false, but investigative reporter Craig Unger, who had been hired by Newsweek to work on the story, said he was shocked by the magazine's deceptive handling of Casey's time "window."
"They knew the window was not real," Unger said of his Newsweek editors. "It was the most dishonest thing that I've been through in my life in journalism." [For more, see Consortiumnews.com's "Inside America's "Adjustment Bureau.'"]
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