Including information about his associates
By Mark Weber (weber@ihr.org) — August 1, 2002
Dear Fredrick,
Thank you for giving each side in the Carto-IHR dispute an opportunity to lay out its arguments. Elisabeth Carto has recently provided a representative sampling of the arguments that she and her husband have made for years. Thank you also for giving me an opportunity to make a final response to her message of July 30.
Apart from her distortions and misrepresentations, Elisabeth Carto makes statements that are demonstrably untrue. One sentence stands out because it’s so obviously false. She writes: In all their [IHR] legal cases, Greg Raven has been authorized to speak for the [LSF/IHR] board of directors without holding any position either as director or officer.
In fact, it is a matter of public record that Raven has been president of the IHR’s parent corporation, LSF, for the past seven years. This is noted, for example, in a malicious and error-ridden attack against him in the latest (July 29) issue of the Carto-controlled American Free Press. Raven’s position is also confirmed in the first settlement agreement of July-August 1999, which we hoped would finally end the years of wrangling between the IHR and the Cartos. This document was signed by Elisabeth and Willis Carto, as well as by Greg Raven as President
of LSF corporation.
While this untrue statement by Elisabeth Carto is not so important in itself, it is all too characteristic of her sloppy treatment of facts.
Elisabeth Carto acknowledges that the two sides made a second agreement to resolve the Carto-IHR dispute. After mentioning that her husband initialed
that settlement agreement, she reports that the Liberty Lobby (LL) board then rejected it as overly onerous. In fact, this agreement, signed on April 5, 2001, has two signatures (not just initials) by Willis Carto. He signed once on behalf of himself and his wife, and a second time on behalf of Liberty Lobby. (Greg Raven signed on behalf of LSF/IHR.) Even if, as Elisabeth contends, the LL board subsequently decided to reject this agreement, that would not have affected the portions that applied to the Cartos. They broke this second settlement agreement, just as they had the first.
I dwell on this because the Cartos, and their apologists, have repeatedly claimed that we have never wanted to settle the costly Carto-IHR dispute, but are interested only in destroying the Cartos. This is exactly opposite of the truth. In fact, it has been Willis Carto who has steadfastly turned down our repeated efforts quietly and peacefully to end the fighting. And consistent with that, for nearly nine years the Cartos have tried to shut us down with harassing lawsuits and a stream of vicious smears.
Elisabeth Carto’s recent messages to you are entirely in keeping with this long-standing campaign. In her July 30 message she characteristically refers to me as an incompetent
and sick individual
with psychological problems
who cannot be measured by normal standards
and who tells lies.
She mentions Weber’s moral corruption
and his moral handicap.
She also suggests that I’m involved in a secret alliance with the Zionist Anti-Defamation League, darkly referring, for example, to my handlers.
The Spotlight weekly, controlled by her husband, has been more explicit, calling me, and others associated with the IHR, agents of the ADL, the Mossad, and the CIA. In one issue, the paper suggested that I operated, at the age of 19, as an undercover CIA agent in West Africa, and that my teaching job at a secondary school in Ghana was a cover story.
In a Spotlight on Mark Weber
series, my name appeared weekly in block letters under an illustration. These have included photographs or drawings of, variously, a rat, a weasel, a snake, a toilet bowl, a cockroach, and a devil.
As she has for years, Elisabeth Carto once again pleads poverty, claiming here that she and her husband are broke. … No one has any money left,
she writes. Well, if that’s true, we’d like to know just who is paying the two lawyers, Howard Singleton and their old friend, Mark Lane, who have been representing the Cartos in their latest lawsuit, which was filed last November in District Court in Houston, Texas, against the IHR (LSF) and Greg Raven and me personally. In this lawsuit, Willis and Elisabeth Carto have the gall to accuse us of defamation.
Their main complaint is that we have referred to Willis Carto as an embezzler. (We do so because that’s what at least one court has affirmed.) As groundless as such lawsuits are, they still cost us enormous time and money.
I am confident that any thoughtful, fair-minded person can easily decide for himself just whose arguments in the IHR-Carto dispute are more substantive, specific and credible. For those who wish to dig deeper into all this, an archive of documents, testimony and other evidence can be found on the Willis A. Carto Information Site.
Cordially,
Mark