My general practice is to treat e-mail communications as private, but I think that an exception to that practice is warranted for e-mails by folks who have libeled me and who are attempting to defend their libel.
Last Friday, in supposed support of his mistaken inference that I took part in a July 2003 NSC Principals meeting on the CIA’s interrogation techniques, Scott Horton alleged on Harper’s website that I am “presently melting [my] keyboard with defenses of the torture-enablers at National Review.” After my assistant, at my request, challenged him by e-mail to substantiate that (baseless) allegation or retract it, Horton sent an e-mail in response. Here’s his defense (emphasis added) of his libelous statement:
Mr. Whelan wrote a series of posts published at NRO in which he discussed Jack Goldsmith’s book The Terror Presidency and highlighted specifically and approvingly Jack’s excuses for the work product of his colleagues at OLC. That is what I had in mind in particular.
I wrote the series of four posts that Horton refers to on a single day in September 2007—more than nineteen months ago. Horton’s assertion that he had those posts in mind when he referred to my “presently melting [my] keyboard with defenses of the torture-enablers” is an obvious falsehood.
Horton’s characterization of my posts about Goldsmith’s book (see here, here, here, and here) is equally ridiculous. My posts summarize aspects of Goldsmith’s book. As I stated in the first post in the series, I “am not well positioned to comment on the issues in immediate dispute, as my own involvement at OLC in opinions on national-security matters generally ranged from non-existent (especially on the opinions that have been the subject of greatest controversy) to marginal.” As for my supposed approval of what Horton wildly misdescribes as “Jack’s excuses for the work product of his colleagues at OLC”: I simply called Goldsmith’s book “a revealing and sympathetic account of the conflicting pressures that executive-branch officials face as they try to protect the country from terrorism” and a “fascinating account of the ‘unusual psychological pressures on executive branch officials who are personally responsible for preventing hard-to-fathom terrorist attacks that could kill thousands.’”
Horton also states in his e-mail:
In addition of course, you are well aware of Mr. Whelan’s serial attacks on Harold Koh, who is probably the most prominent critic of the torture-enablers with whom Mr. Whelan previously worked.
The fact that Horton relegates this proposition to an afterthought—and doesn’t present it as what he “had in mind in particular” when he made his libelous statement—suggests that even he recognizes that it’s absurd to equate criticism of Harold Koh with what he calls “defenses of the torture-enablers.”