Westmoreland Jurors Told to Ignore Sharon Suit

The federal judge trying Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s $120-million libel suit against CBS admonished the jury Thursday to pay no attention if another jury considering former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s suit against Time magazine reaches a verdict.

The two much-publicized cases have gone on in the same courthouse, and the Sharon jury concluded Wednesday that the former Israeli defense chief was defamed by a 1982 article in the magazine. That jury must decide several other questions before determining whether Sharon was libeled by the article, which said he had “discussed the need for revenge” with Lebanese leaders the day before allowing the Christian militia to enter two Beirut refugee camps, where they massacred hundreds of civilians.

U.S. District Judge Pierre N. Leval had recessed the Westmoreland trial for the weekend Thursday, but hurriedly called the jury back into the courtroom. Acknowledging that parallels have been drawn between the two suits, he reminded jurors that the Sharon case “has absolutely nothing to do with what we are considering here . . . it is absolutely, totally different.”

Anticipating a possible windup of the Sharon deliberations over the next three days, Leval said: “That case is that case and this case is this case.”

With CBS still early in the process of presenting its defense testimony, the Westmoreland trial is expected to continue for about another month. It wound up its 14th week Thursday.

Leval’s admonition to the jury came after a second day of cross-examination of former CIA analyst Sam Adams.

Less Ominous Figures

A paid CBS consultant and a co-defendant in the suit, Adams was a chief source of information for the controversial CBS documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.”

Aired in 1982, the program contended, as Adams had argued for years, that enemy troop strength was underestimated in the Vietnam War. It contended that Westmoreland conspired to produce less ominous figures so it would appear to Washington that the United States was succeeding in the war in 1967.

Westmoreland attorney David Dorsen spent the first two days of his cross-examination trying to shake Adams’ account of a Pentagon meeting at which the documentary contended that enemy troop figures were arbitrarily cut by officers representing Westmoreland.

CBS contends that Westmoreland set a ceiling on the enemy estimates, triggering a series of deceptions.

Dorsen also sought Thursday to show that Adams had insufficient and suspect evidence for his contention that enemy infiltration had been underestimated by 100,000 men in the several months immediately preceding the January, 1968, Tet offensive.

As he did during questioning by CBS lawyers earlier, Adams poured forth a torrent of statistics, meeting dates and accounts of memos that went back and forth in the disagreement between the CIA and Westmoreland’s Vietnam command over the guidelines for calculating enemy strength.

With the jury out of the room, Leval sternly advised Adams that he was required to answer Dorsen’s questions before launching back into his own narrative of events.