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Michael Moore, the poster boy for anti-establishment doc makers with woeful personal grooming habits, must be feeling extremely relieved today, as the amputee war veteran who was suing over some interview footage of him shot for an NBC Nightly News segment, but which turned up in Fahrenheit 9/11, has had his case thrown out of court:

According to court papers, Judge Douglas Woodlock of U.S. District Court in Massachusetts dismissed the suit on Wednesday. It had sought $35 million in damages from Moore, as well as Miramax, which is owned by Walt Disney Co. and several other film companies.

The film showed Iraq war veteran Sgt. Peter Damon, who had lost his right arm near the shoulder and much of his left arm, lying in a hospital gurney at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Maryland, saying that he feels pain but that pain-killers given him "take a lot of the edge" off of it.

The judge's rejection of the suit's claims that Damon's brief appearance somehow resulted in "defamation and infliction of emotional distress" in a way helps to further Moore's credentials as a legitimate documentarian—i.e. the repurposed clip remained news, not anti-military propaganda. We only hope the outspoken filmmaker doesn't grow drunk off the power of this one legal victory, however, and choose now to people Sicko, his searing indictment of the U.S. healthcare industry, with a series of interviews with morgue corpses asked to share their thoughts on how their HMOs have been working out for them.