One Response to Oliver Kamm

According to Oliver Kamm, our "Open Letter to Amnesty International's London and Belfast Offices, on the Occasion of Noam Chomsky's Belfast Festival Lecture, October 30, 2009"[1],

"blithely repeated claims that were judged to be defamatory in the High Court in 2000, when ITN successfully sued Living Marxism (LM) magazine. LM had claimed that Ed Vulliamy, along with Penny Marshall and Ian Williams of ITN, had been fraudulent in reporting the Trnopolje camp in Bosnia…."[2]

Kamm is wrong.

Nowhere in the March 2000 verdict in the libel case brought by ITN against LM for publishing Thomas Deichmann's "The Picture that Fooled the World"[3] did the jury reject the specific factual claim by Deichmann and LM that when the first encounter took place between these British reporters and Fikret Alic and the other Bosnian Muslim men on August 5, 1992, it was Marshall, Williams, and Vulliamy who were standing behind the fence through which the interviews were carried out and the film taken. As Deichmann argued, this part chicken-wire, part barbed-wire fence surrounded an agriculture-related compound at a much larger site that included a public school and a community center, but was then serving as a camp for displaced persons and detainees during the civil wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the center of this compound stood a barn, the fence having been erected prior to the civil wars to enclose the barn and objects related to it. But this fence did not surround or enclose the Bosnian Muslim men standing on the opposite side of it from the British reporters, outside the immediate compound in which the British reporters stood.
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