Klatt's clunkers 1: Bernard Klatt given an award for tendentious testimony

We have been seeing that the testimony of Bernard Klatt in the Lemire hearing has been substandard in many ways: indeed, the entire notion that "lucy" and "90sAREover" were the same user, which can now be confidently dismissed, was based almost entirely on his error-riddled testimony.

This all makes the image to the left all the more problematic. In it Klatt is being presented with an award from lawyer Doug Christie -- the same Doug Christie who is famous for having defended holocaust deniers Jim Keegstra and Ernst Zundel. The "Orwell Award" (named apparently without much of a sense of irony) was given to Klatt for his "expert" testimony in several human rights cases, including the Lemire hearing. In all of them Klatt appeared for the defense.

Thankfully, the award has not been noticed by any mainstream venues. The places that it's appeared, however, are themselves noteworthy, being the usual suspects when it comes to hate-propaganda.

• Freedomsite.org (which is Lemire's site);
• Stormfront;
• David Duke.

That Klatt should be recognized for his testimony is a bit rich. His testimony at the Zundel case (where he argued that webpages should not be included among communications made "telephonically") was criticized in the final decision as under-informed and tendentious:

[103] … The evidence of Mr. Bernard Klatt was of very limited assistance to us. Mr. Klatt demonstrated an extremely shallow foundation of knowledge in his area of expertise during the course of his testimony. A series of dictionary definitions were put to him, many of which he acknowledged he had not seen before his preparation for this hearing. From the Tribunal's perspective, he seemed unable to provide much information independent of the written materials placed before him by Mr. Christie.

[104] During cross-examination, Mr. Klatt was frequently argumentative, evasive and unable to answer elementary questions in his field. Most troubling to the Tribunal was the extent to which this witness responded as an advocate for the Respondent and not as an objective, independent expert. Mr. Klatt's responses are replete with references to what "we are arguing", and similar allusions to his shared common cause with the Respondent.

Some of these problems appeared again during Klatt's testimony at the Lemire hearing, as we'll see in coming posts.

Other posts in the Klatt's clunkers series:

• Klatt's clunkers 1: Bernard Klatt given an award for tendentious testimony
• Klatt's clunkers 2: Bernard Klatt wrong on IE 6 date
• Klatt's clunkers 3: Bernard Klatt misreads the user agent string
• Klatt's clunkers 4: Bernard Klatt mistakes the combined log format for the common log format
• Klatt's clunkers 5: Bernard Klatt doesn't recognize RealPlayer browser
• Klatt's clunkers 6: Bernard Klatt on Rogers service in BC
• Klatt's Clunkers 7: Bernard Klatt doesn't understand Rogers web caching
• Klatt's Clunkers 8: Bernard Klatt comes close on proxies
• Klatt's Clunkers: why Bernard Klatt should be disbelieved (summary thread)