Harper’s Libels the U.S. Army With An Anonymous Smear

We’ve covered the story of Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi stringer for the Associated Press who was on cozy terms with terrorists, most recently here. Hussein was arrested in the company of terrorists and has now been charged with giving material support to terrorist groups. An investigating judge in Baghdad has the case and will decide whether there are sufficient grounds for prosecution. If so, he will refer the case to be heard by a three-judge court.
The Associated Press has backed Hussein unreservedly, and other media organizations have joined in calling for his release, even though 1) they don’t know what the evidence against Hussein is, and 2) his own photographs, as we have pointed out more than once, demonstrate that he is, at a minimum, on friendly terms with terrorists and is viewed by them as a sympathetic conduit for their propaganda.
On Sunday, Harper’s published the most over-the-top defense of Hussein yet, by one Scott Horton. Horton argues that Bilal Hussein is the John Peter Zenger of Iraq, and that the Iraqi government’s prosecution of Hussein (actually, in Horton’s telling, Iraq has nothing to do with it, and the prosecution is entirely the work of the U.S. military) is analogous to the British prosecution of Zenger in 1735. I’m not making this up; Horton writes that “Iraq