How The Church of Scientology Has Used, AND Still Uses The American Legal System To Destroy Critics
Article submitted by Number 6
What is lawfare and how does this relate to the cult?
In the post 9/11 era, new terms and new ideas to describe how war is currently being fought today have popped up in the media, in the press, in the think tanks and on blogs on all sides of the spectrum. One such term is lawfare. On page 55 of the book Unrestricted Warfare, it calls for the use of “international law warfare (seizing the earliest opportunity to set up regulations)†along with a set of other types of warfare that an enemy with more firepower cannot withstand for long. Since 2001, the term has been used to describe how individual supporters of terrorism have tried to silence people who expose them.
Take the case of Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi Arabian billionaire who sued American author Rachel Ehrenfeld for libel in the UK because in her book Funding Evil she named him as a major contributor of money to terrorist organizations. British libel laws place the burden of proof on the defendant, and given Dr. Ehrenfeld’s limited resources even with government documents as proof, she lost. In 2008, Governor George Pataki of New York signed Rachel’s law, which grants protection to American citizens being sued by what are called libel tourists. The laws of the US and the UK are different when it comes to freedom of speech and the protection of that right.
Lawfare, to give you a tl;dr (too long, didn't read) definition, is the use of a country’s legal system by an individual or corporation to utterly crush their adversaries. The term is currently used in the context of the War on Terror, but the definition should be broadened to include any other individual or group who tries to ruin an adversary in court, including and especially, the Church of Scientology.
“We are going to sue your ass and your balls!â€
Recently, the Canadian magazine Maisonneuve published an article on long time Scientology critic Gerry Armstrong, detailing the enduring harassment campaign against him. The author of the article goes so far as to call him Scientology’s Salman Rushdie, because of the severity of the Church of Scientology’s harassment of him.
Armstrong was once in the close inner circle of Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard, and was asked to help author Omar Garrison to compile a biography of Hubbard. When he found out much of Hubbard’s life story had so many discrepancies, to put it lightly, he couldn’t work on the biography project anymore. When he left the cult in 1981, Gerry had boxes of material on L. Ron Hubbard that were embarrassing for the founder and his "Church", and so began the harassment campaign against Armstrong.
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