A Democratic congresswoman from Georgia is suing The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for libel. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney filed charges against the newspaper's editor Cynthia Tucker and publisher John Mellott for an editorial column that ran in the Sunday July 30 paper about McKinney's alleged altercation with police, according to All Headline News.McKinney's attorney, J.M. Raffauf, said the column describes McKinney whacking a police officer with her cell phone, a charge McKinney denies. The suit says that other facts were misstated including a reported suggestion by McKinney that President Bush had known about the September 11 terror attacks in advance, and had allowed the plot to unfold so that he and his friends could profit from the resulting wars.
The suits says that McKinney wants an "immediate retraction in writing these false and libelous statements" and "demands that your retraction and correction be accompanied by an editorial in which you specifically repudiate your libelous statements."