Murtha-Suing Lawyer: I’m No GOP Shill

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

When someone sues a sitting congressman for defamation, it doesn’t go unnoticed. So when Marine Sgt. Frank Wuterich sued Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) last week, charging the congressman falsely accused him of “cold-blooded murder and war crimes,” it got some attention. More, perhaps, than it deserved.

The story got boosted in part because last November Wuterich’s squad killed two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq, an event whose details are currently being scrutinized by the Defense Department. The lawsuit got another boost in attention because Murtha is himself a veteran, as well as a hawkish Democratic lawmaker who has come out against the Iraq war.

But from there, the story gained a life of its own, as questions were raised about whether the suit was politically motivated — after all, the GOP would stand to gain if the Democrat Murtha’s credentials as a soldier’s soldier were undercut. As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

[The goal of the lawsuit] is so clearly to punish Murtha not for any supposed defamation, but because he is a prominent and effective political critic of the administration and of the war. He must therefore be smeared and punished, and that is clearly what this lawsuit is intended to accomplish.

Greenwald based his assertion on the fact that pro-war partisans, notably Rep. John Kline (R-MN), had made similar comments but did not face similar action from Wuterich and his lawyers.

However, the lawyer responsible for the suit, Mark Zaid, is hardly a partisan. (A disclaimer: I know Mark Zaid. I have attended parties he’s thrown, I even went to a baseball game with him once.) The guy has a long history of fighting tough battles, mostly on behalf of people who say they were wronged by the national security establishment. He represented FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds; Able Danger whistleblower Anthony Schaffer; Marines punished for refusing controversial Anthrax vaccines; and dozens of other soldiers, spies and analysts who were punished by their employers but whose cases never grabbed headlines. And even — once — Arianna Huffington.

From my perspective — having covered intelligence and homeland security for a couple years — Zaid was always a reliable quoter when someone needed to speak in favor of government openness, or on behalf of employees in classified areas who most likely could never speak for themselves. So, I figured, let me call him and get him on the record.

We spoke this weekend. Here is what he told me:

Nobody’s paying for the damn thing. . . . We have at no time ever been contacted by any organization, political or otherwise, that either suggested the lawsuit or has been paying for the lawsuit. This is in no way coordinated with any outside group. [The suit] was completely my brainchild. . . .

The purpose is to proclaim [Wuterich’s] innocence and make it clear he did nothing wrong, and respond to these various malicious accusations that he’s a war criminal. He’s been dealing with it for three months now. Most military individuals will just take it because that’s what they’re trained to do. I wanted to fight back.

Wuterich claims he and his squad followed military guidelines in hunting insurgents in Haditha. And the non-partisan-ness of Zaid, Wuterich and others may be beyond question by Greenwald: in a letter to Kline they broached the topic of the Murtha-like comments he made about the Marines at Haditha.

Update: An earlier version of this post stated Greenwald had accused Zaid specifically of acting out of partisanship; in fact, Greenwald accused some combination of Wuterich and/or members of his legal team as having solely partisan motivations, but gave no specific names.

Late Update: An earlier version of this post stated Wuterich and his lawyers had taken “legal action” against Kline for his statements; in fact, they wrote him a letter. Thanks to Reader RK for pointing this out.

Latest Muckraker
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: