Opinion ID: 712057
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Reasons to doubt the credibility of Ben-Menashe

Text: 35 Ben-Menashe is the source for many of the details in October Surprise, including the ones in the passage under attack in this case. Several of Unger's sources made clear to him their belief that Ben-Menashe was a liar, and Esquire does not deny its awareness of these views; it couldn't, as the article passed a substantial chunk of them through to the readers. The article directly quotes a former CIA officer and a Washington Post journalist as calling him, respectively, a liar and a con man. It notes that when he took a lie detector test he failed miserably, and it quotes an ABC News producer as saying that in the lie detector test Ben-Menashe goes way off the chart on all relevant questions. My theory is that a lot of what he says is true, but that Ari exaggerates his own role and muddies the water. But full (or pretty full) publication of the grounds for doubting a source tends to rebut a claim of malice, not to establish one. See Tavoulareas, 817 F.2d at 788 n. 35. 36 We are not, of course, saying that one may altogether shield a defamation simply by including the source's reputation as a liar. Here Esquire supplied an answer of sorts to the question of why, knowing Ben-Menashe's flaws, they still saw fit to pass his accusations on to its readers. Editor William Blythe approved addition of the phrase, Yet it's almost impossible to dismiss him, directly after the recitation of Ben-Menashe's vulnerabilities. Explaining the decision, he testified, We wouldn't have used him as a source unless we thought he had some knowledgeability.... We ... knew that he ... was the [sic; a?] source of the Iran-Contra story, and certainly that had checked out, and also that Congress was investigating Ari Ben-Menashe's charges and using him as a witness. Esquire's editor-in-chief, in the course of elaborating on his denial that he knew that what Ben-Menashe was saying was as likely to be false as it was to be true, also pointed to Ben-Menashe's apparent vindication in Iran-Contra. And the editors relied on Unger's record; he had worked with Esquire editor David Hirshey on two earlier pieces, and Hirshey had found him exemplary. Reliance on a reporter's reputation can indeed show a lack of actual malice by a publisher. See Speer v. Ottaway Newspapers, Inc., 828 F.2d 475, 478 (8th Cir.1987); McManus v. Doubleday & Co., 513 F.Supp. 1383, 1390 (S.D.N.Y.1981). Cf. Washington Post Co. v. Keogh, 365 F.2d 965, 971-72 (D.C.Cir.1966) (exploring difficulties in using writer's questionable reputation against the publisher). McFarlane does not dispute the validity of these bases for Esquire's going forward (though he does, of course, assert Esquire's allegedly inadequate attention to countervailing negatives). 37 As to Ben-Menashe's being interviewed by congressional staffers, we have in the past given weight to the fact that a source told congressional investigators the same story that he told the defendant, under circumstances where lying could have serious consequences. See Tavoulareas, 817 F.2d at 791 (source gave information to congressional investigators in formal setting which, though without oath, could possibly lead to criminal liability for lying). But no one should suppose that such colloquies add up to some sort of congressional endorsement. That it may make sense for congressional staffers to give the time of day to a wildly improbable source, on the off chance that he will yield something useful, tells virtually nothing about the source's credibility. Further, Esquire does not even claim to have had information that Ben-Menashe's statements to the investigators were the same as to Unger, and it offered no evidence that the circumstances of the interviews in any way would have alerted Ben-Menashe to the penalties for lying. 38 McFarlane says that Esquire reviewed a report by the PBS television documentary Frontline, showing that an arms dealer, Houshang Lavi, not Ben-Menashe, attended a meeting at the L'Enfant Plaza with some Reagan campaign foreign policy advisers. (This meeting actually occurred. See Task Force Report at 109-18.) From the fact that the final article did not mention the L'Enfant Plaza meeting, whereas Unger's original draft did, expressing doubt about Ben-Menashe's claim to have been present there, McFarlane argues that the jury could infer a willful intent to suppress an instance where Ben-Menashe was proven flat-out false. It is not clear to us that the pronouncements of an obscure international arms dealer are so self-evidently true that they could be said to establish the falsity of Ben-Menashe's claims, though of course the contradiction is not trivial. (In fact, the strongest evidence presented to the Task Force on the identity of the foreign interlocutor, a contemporaneous memo by participant Richard Allen, identifies him as one A.A. Mohammed, a Malaysian and so far as appears in no way connected to Ben-Menashe or Lavi. See id. at 115.) Moreover, McFarlane has not directed our attention to any depositions indicating what real contact Esquire editors may have had with the Frontline report or with raw data as to the L'Enfant Plaza meeting generally. 39 In sum, given Ben-Menashe's supposed role as a source in Iran-Contra, Unger's reputation with Esquire, and the inherent difficulties in verifying or refuting a claim that someone is the agent of a foreign power, the proofs do not add up to the possibility of a reasonable jury finding of clear and convincing evidence of reckless awareness of probable falsity, and in no way show an actual belief in falsity. 40