Annus Horribilis        
by Paul William Roberts

To those few generous souls who have noticed my silence and absence from any medium over the past year, I have for some time now felt I owed an explanation.

 

The reason I am thus dictating the following one is that, since last November, I have lost the sight in both my eyes.

[ED: Paul William Roberts is Senior Writer at Atlantic Free Press.]

 

Holes began appearing in the retina of my right eye in May, 2007, which several operations failed to repair. Six months later, the left eye followed a similar path. Causation in retinal disintegration is not clearly understood – stress? Poor diet? 14-hour days too close to a computer monitor? Syphilis? Diabetes? Bad luck? Voodoo or malevolent discarnate entities? 

 

None of these is discounted, but two specialists – the two unaccountably free from a conviction that their patients have no need nor right to question them on issues too arcane for any but retinal experts to comprehend – agreed that my own suggestion the eye problem might be another side effect of the prolonged exposure to depleted uranium I was treated to by the Pentagon while in Iraq during 2003 and which has been causing various bodily ailments since 2004, debilitating flues, nausea, and chronic fatigue being previous highlights.

Since only the Pentagon has detailed data on D.U. exposure, which of course are unavailable to civilians and even most soldiers for reasons of national security – usually meaning it would shock and appall the American public who unwillingly fund such military barbarisms – it is impossible to learn much about its consequences, let alone find any form of treatment. I did, however, watch an enlightening video produced by the U.S. military for troops in the field. If you suspect you have been exposed to D.U., it said, try not to be, have a shower, and cover any surfaces that might be contaminated with duct tape or virtually anything else available. Then fill out a detailed report using the template available from unit medics. It must be comforting to discover the tender concern CENCOM has for your welfare and safety. On the same DVD was a US Navy recruiting ad showing what a hectically exciting life awaits those bold enough to sign up. It concluded with what I assume to be the new US motto: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of all who stand in their way”. Great copy, as they say on Madison Avenue.

This blindness was not the only fly in 2007’s swamp of ointment. Never before in my life have I, on December 31st at the stroke of midnight, told an entire year to fuck off and shove auld lang syne into Robbie Burns’ sporran. The twelve-month bayou was malarial with the plip-plopping of a billion tiny wings floundering in or sucked under its Vaseline lake.

It began promptly in 07’s first month with a letter from the sanctimonious ante bellum prig at a law firm representing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper accusing me of plagiarizing one of their writers. Having never even seen a copy of this rag or visited its website (if it has one), I found this somewhat unlikely. He pointed out three sentences of mine that were virtually identical to three his newspaper had published three years before my book on America’s holocaust in Iraq, A War Against Truth, saw the light of day. There was also a quote from some US official that his journalist obtained in an interview but my footnotes ascribed to “Interview with author” – presumably me.

My only certainty was that I’d never read the Journal-Constitution – its irritatingly memorable title permitted no room for doubt in this. What annoyed me, though, was the trifling nature of the issue. It was not plagiarism in any rational sense of the term.

 

Later that month I heard a story on CBC radio about a Canadian who was visiting Los Angeles and found his play about Sherlock Holmes was being performed in a small Westwood theatre, its authorship accorded to a man who also happened to be the production’s director.

 

That’s plagiarism.

 

Dozens of sentences lifted from the work of a major prose stylist might also fall into the category. The same with an entire plot line. The Atlanta journalist wrote a clear, serviceable prose, but I think he would agree he isn’t Vladimir Nabokov. Besides, if I rip something off – and, like every writer I know I do, unwillingly, or for various reasons such as space, unable to saddle my text with another source citation – I am perfectly capable of producing an unimpeachable paraphrase. And it isn’t as if my book doesn’t cite its sources.

 

There are hundreds of footnotes crediting hundreds of books, journals, newspapers, and people. But not the Atlanta Journal-Constitution – which, since I have never read it, doesn’t surprise me.

If I had plundered the J.C. for an article appearing in the Toronto Globe & Mail on the following day, I could see some grounds for righteous indignation down in Georgia. But three years later the events reported were hardly news. They were history, and also, to many, public knowledge. Does one have to cite a source for stating Clinton didn’t regard fellatio as “sexual relations”?

I toyed with writing an offended rebuttal, calling the similarity of my three sentences to theirs “a coincidence”. As for the interview with the official, I couldn’t recall interviewing him, true, but then I couldn’t recall dozens of people I had interviewed. Maybe he had told me the same thing he told Atlanta? On book tours, I tell the same thing to half the people interviewing me. I no longer recall the official’s name, despite having a better reason to remember it, but being blind gives me a watertight explanation for being too lazy to look it up.

 

I do confess, however, to possessing scant regard for specifics if they strike me as less relevant than the overarching truth about which I am writing. Why let facts stand in the way of a general reality?

I remember, while a colleague and I toured the refugee camp that sprawled near the Jordan-Iraq border during the first Gulf War, finding it risibly inappropriate when I heard Paul Watson – erstwhile Pulitzer Prize-winning Toronto Star foreign correspondent – ask a seven-foot Sudanese man, black as a monsoon cloud, with tribal scars like parentheses framing the sorrowful moonlit pools of his eyes, “Have I spelled Nkombasu Akimbo correctly?” He held up his spiral reporter’s pad for verification. “ And how old are you, Nkombasu?” The man, who couldn’t read, had been telling us how he had lost everything he’d worked for over the past three years as a manual labourer when he fled the bombing in Baghdad. Now he was stranded in Jordan, penniless, informed that his government was not going to help him get back home. “They say me Red Crescent peoples will assist us, but there no Red Crescent here and now I not knowing what I shall do…” I wondered if the Star’s readers would suspect his story was a fabrication lacking all credibility unless they were provided with his name and age – so they could …what? Call his tin hut in southern Sudan and verify the details?

When one considers the brazen lies, shameless political bias, acres of rank nonsense, total absence of real investigative reporting, and genuflecting reverence for corporate sociopaths that fill the inane and noisy pages of those propend sheets for the greedy-power-hungry complex that pass for newspapers in North America, this fretfully obsessive concern with petty details, including my high crimes is enough to make you run naked and yodeling through rush hour traffic, is it not? And if it is not, ask yourself why an incident – reported by the New York Times – concerning the US attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah caused little outrage when its destruction or occupation of hospitals – with patients and doctors brutally herded into locked rooms in handcuffs – and numerous other barbaric acts, like depriving civilians of food and fresh water. Such acts are specifically and unambiguously declared war crimes in the Geneva Protocols, which are international law. Yet it is my so-called plagiarism that inculcated more outrage by a leading newspaper than four years of US state terror.

All the same, I called Atlanta the same day to tell the lawyer he was unquestionably right in assuming I had failed to attribute his journalist’s work. I would have to scour my notes, I said, in order to find out the cause of this lapse. Since I had just moved to a new office and my papers were still in boxes, this would take time.

His voice was reminiscent of William F. Buckley, dripping with scorn and sarcasm. It made me instantly regret the humble apologetic tone I’d adopted, and which, considering the triviality of the matter, I had initially hoped might close it for good there and then. But no, he demanded a full written account – an unreasonable request in itself from a freelance writer, for whom time is literally money, and money is habitually in short supply.

It was not the Atlanta journalist, Jay Bookman, who had apparently noted the similarity of my three sentences to his, but instead a reader, who claimed he thought highly of my book until discovering the heinous abomination. I now find myself incapable of believing that any reader would recall five years later the exact wording of three sentences in a newspaper column. Given the attempts to prevent publication of A War Against Truth in the US – and from fairly high places – I became increasingly suspicious that this so-called plagiarism accusation was part of a more concerted effort to attack the book on legal grounds that would not involve the Pentagon drawing attention to the matters that really concerned them, along with the nefarious neocon think tanks, such as the now-disgraced Project for a New American Century (whose website has been remarkably silent for some years). Still, to appease my publisher, whom I knew to be concerned about legal action, I finally penned the following excessively abject apology, with which my publisher was very pleased and assumed the lawyers in Georgia would be content. In part it read:

• In trying to find an explanation for this journalistic travesty, I went through the notebooks that were my primary source while writing. Since I am still in the process of moving, I could not at first locate these notebooks, but in another box of Iraq materials I found a document called “Pax America”, which turned out to be a talk for members of the University of Toronto, but also contains the material from pages 39-43 of A War Against Truth. In that version, which I sent you, maddeningly, Mr. Bookman and the Journal-Constitution are referred to as the source, and it is clear Mr. Bookman is the author who interviewed Donald Kagan. I found this baffling, defiant of reason, until I unpacked the notebooks themselves. It was obvious to me, once I had found the section in question, that I had first encountered Mr. Bookman’s article in March 2003 while in Baghdad, and not at home the previous September . The journalists with whom I lodged during the first weeks of the war, Paul Hackett and Philip Sherwell of the London Sunday Telegraph, will gladly confirm that I only had access to the Internet and E-mail via their satellite connections when they were not using their computers. I read Mr. Bookman’s article on a website about Iraq and not at the Journal-Constitution’s site, which is why I had no memory of visiting the newspaper’s site. Indeed, I have never , as far as I am aware, visited the J-C site. It was impossible to print out anything in Baghdad. Even if you found a printer, there was no paper anywhere (paper had been part of the UN embargo). So I wrote down in notebooks what interested me, gluing all manner of papers and wrappers alongside or on top. By the time I left Iraq, in August 2003, the notebooks looked as if they had survived a cataclysm. Paul Hackett, however, also kindly offered me a file of my very own on his laptop, promising to e-mail it when we were all back home. The Bookman article was one of the items in that file, but Hackett forgot to send it until the following year.
• By the time it arrived, I was hard at work on the book. I used my notebooks almost exclusively for this, since it was to be principally a personal narrative of the Invasion. For my talk to the United Church, though, I used more diverse materials, including the Hackett file’s version of Mr. Bookman’s article. This is why the draft of the talk does attribute the relevant sections to him, and why the book disgraced itself in that area. With the knowledge I have now, I can see what I failed to see when going through my notes: the smudge that spells out “AJ-C”, the scrawl that looks like “Boo—lsm” yet seen through hindsight reads “Bookman.” And so on. Alas, alack!
• One of the perils of freelance existence is the need for speed. After all, for a freelancer, time literarily is money. Because of it, and all too often, I fear, I have let go what ought to have been reviewed or questioned were there but world enough and time. Everything on every level has seemed frantic and rushed for so long now that I scarcely question the condition any more, let alone try slowing it down. This incident has forced me ask myself a lot of hard questions over the past few days. Many remain unanswered, yet even the few I’ve been able to tackle delivered answers that leave a bitter taste.
• It is a pity I had to learn this lesson about the dangers of sloppiness at the expense of a colleague. But it is, all the same a valuable and essential lesson. I am still not sure, however, that I know how to implement it, how to slow things down. But I’m certain I don’t want a repetition of this woeful business, thus I am certain that any preventative steps required are ones I will persist at.
• I shall close by repeating I am so very sorry this incident occurred at all, and I wish with all my heart that it had not. I apologize unequivocally for it, and experience a genuinely head-hanging sense of shame about it. Mea culpa…

Again, considering the triviality of the ‘omission’, I felt the apologetic overkill would not be lost on all concerned, and the fact that the notes were written under great duress in a war zone something any editor could find a forgivable lapse in any writer.

Imagine thus my surprise when the Globe & Mail ran the story with large photograph as half of its second page. This is the newspaper that didn’t feel US use of chemical weapons at Fallujah didn’t merit any space at all, remember.

The Globe article had a copy of my letter of apology, from which it quoted my remorse yet omitted my explanations. The article made the offense seem dire and a savage indictment of the whole book – most of which, of course, is an eye-witness account of the invasion and hardly capable of plagiarism. It stated that shipments of the “best seller” had been halted as a result of the scandal.

The Globe could only have obtained a copy of my letter from either the Atlanta lawyers or from Raincoast Publishing. The latter, I felt, had nothing to gain by such publicity, so I assumed collusion between the newspapers. Certain editors at the Globe had been looking for excuse to stop publishing me ever since I had openly accused the paper of illegal collusion in efforts to win the election of 2005 for Stephen Harper’s neocon reactionaries; as well as its distinctly pro-US, pro-Israel, anti-Muslim bias.

 

A 2006 article I’d written for the Globe predicting collapse of the US economy – hardly open to dispute now – was actually attacked by one of their own anonymous editorials. This was evidently a first, since the editor is supposedly in charge of the content.

But the editorial had been penned by Marcus Gee, a brainless knee-jerk neocon hack, and inserted with the editor-in-chief’s knowledge. I offered to debate Gee in any forum he chose on the subject, but he always managed to squirm his way out of the commitment. More interesting, I later learned, was Marcus Gee’s own tussle with plagiarism – one a little more serious than mine, I suggest. He had cited from a Zionist hate website certain ‘facts’ regarding Palestinian perfidy with checking the facts – which proved baseless – and without mentioning his source for them.

 

The Globe, unsurprisingly, saw no reason to run this as a story, although soon after Gee was dispatched to run their Far East Bureau, an exile from which he returned last year without fanfare.

Hearing no more from Atlanta, I assumed my apology was accepted and the matter dropped. It thus came as a devastating blow to read, again in the Globe, that Raincoast had decided to destroy all remaining copies of A War Against Truth as a result of the ‘plagiarism’ accusation.

 

This was the first I had heard of such a draconian measure. In such cases, as far as I am aware, the problem is solved by an ‘erratum’ slip placed in each copy correcting the failure to attribute the sentences in question. By now I had received dozens of letters from other writers expressing their outrage at the way this incident had been blown out of proportion, many admitting to committing similar lapses or errors themselves.

 

Checking manuscripts for such omissions is a tedious business open to human error, especially when the humans in question are freelancers working in the little time they have between paying work.

There was also little doubt that this leak to the Globe came from within Raincoast Publishing itself. I now know the source of it and am patient enough to bide the time of my revenge. It was gratifying to learn, however, that the company ceased to be a publisher of books earlier this year, returning to the task of distributing them to which it is far better suited. I hope they will frame the photograph I sent them of a Nazi book burning in 1933 as a reminder of what implications lurk in the heart of actions like the ones to which they were party.

I then wrote the following letter to Atlanta to discover if legal pressure was behind this book burning:

• I wonder if you would kindly answer the following questions so that I can have a clearer idea of events since we spoke on the telephone about my book A WAR AGAINST TRUTH.
• 1) Were you dissatisfied in some way with my letter of apology and explanation?
• 2) Did you seek or are you seeking some further penalty or punishment for the failure to accredit the Journal-Constitution and Mr. Bookman?
• 3) In your opinion, would an "errata" slip in each book correcting the credit suffice until a new edition can be printed?
• I have been kept out of the loop regarding matters since I wrote to you, and it would be immensely helpful if you could clear these three issues up.
• I thank you in anticipation.

This is the reply I received:

• Mr.Roberts,
• Respectfully, we do not wish to communicate with you further on this matter.
• Thank you,

Quite dumbfounded by this, I then wrote the following despite their wishes:
 

• Do you not think I have a right to an answer for at least the first two questions? Respectfully? I do not see much respect in your reply. 'Respectfully', I wrote at length to you in January. And 'respectfully', I patiently awaited your response to what I considered to be an honest, abject apology accepting all responsibility for the regrettable omission. In such cases, surely, one direct communication deserves, and indeed requires a reply — no matter what the nature of that reply may be.
• I am quite astounded by your refusal to answer questions regarding a matter in which I am the principal party, questions germane to an issue with which you and I were dealing directly after my publisher instructed me totelephone you.I had agreed to show him my letter to you before sending it, thus I know he was fully satisfied with its contents — in fact his e-mail states that he thought it was "excellent". But it was your response, as aggrieved party, that I badly wanted to read. A response to which, also, one would think, I had every reason to feel a right — if only out of common courtesy.
• I am simply amazed to find myself the central player in events that no one feels obligated — although their repercussions solely affect me adversely — to explain or even state before they are set in motion, as if I were simply a pawn in a game. It will not require much of a stretch in imagination for you to perceive that, if the situation were reversed, you too would feel indignant — if not more sinned against than sinning.
• You act as if I ignored your initial letter, as if I wrote no letter of apology. To whom is an explanation owed if not to me? Who merits being informed of something that will dramatically affect and cause untold harm to my life if not me? Your response today simply adds more fuel to the fire of my suspicion that this matter is not about what it purports to be about. I can see no earthly reason why you should refuse to answer my first two questions. Had you done so I would simply be in possession now of facts to which I believe I have an inalienable right — in much the same way as a defendant has a right to hear the verdict of a court. If this assumption is incorrect, please inform me how and why it is so. In fact I am under the impression it is a fundamental principle of both US and Canadian law.
• Please revise your actions in this matter and implement a little fairness and common decency into them. After all, I am only asking questions about matters that have a direct bearing upon my own life — something in which I have a greater vested interest than anyone else involved here. Again, if this idea is incorrect, I fail to see how it is so or why.
• As Mr. Bookman observed, "sunshine is the best antiseptic". I could use a little sunshine myself now, because this darkness is unhealthy and you could so easily dispel it — you should dispel it too, since the longer it remains, the closer "an eye for an eye" gets to blinding the whole world. The punishment does not seem to fit the crime. Habeas corpus.
• Sincerely,

Predictably, this received no reply at all from the eminent legal firm in Atlanta, for whose benefit I obtained a framed photograph of Ulysses S. Grant to hang in my office.

Repercussions from this vindictiveness contained. My new publisher, Key Porter, terminated a two-book contract, using the underhand technique of insisting the advance monies already agreed upon should be halved. And my literary agent, pressured by her company, dropped me as a client. My career was effectively trashed, and the so-called plagiarism had nothing to do with it. As I wrote about the followers of Leo Strauss in my novel Homeland, the ruthless elimination of perceived enemies by any means available is considered mere political expediency.

Far worse events have been occurring since I last wrote, and I shall turn to these in my next articles. I may be blind and blacklisted from major media, yet I can still see well enough which way the world goes. With the rights of all my books now back in my possession, I am free to offer them for no advance to any publisher willing to grant me a fair percentage of any profits made. Needless to say, events of the past year have left me penniless and nearly destitute.

 

 

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