Posted Tuesday,
September 28, 1999 | |||
May 31, 1993 The ADL Spy
Probe from
Alexander Cockburn's "Beat the Devil," a bi-weekly
column in The Nation. May 31, 1993 THERE have been fears that
political pressure might squelch the case against
the Anti-Defamation League spies being built by the
San Francisco District Attorney, Arlo Smith.
But the "San Francisco Examiner" for May 11
[1993] carried a story by Dennis Opatrny
and Scott Winokur reporting that top
officials of the ADL are "the ultimate targets of
the San Francisco district attorney's domestic
spying investigation." Such officials include the
ADL's New York-based director of research, Irwin
Suall. Meanwhile, the ADL's strategy is to link
critics of its spy operation with neo-Nazis and
with the World Trade Center bombers. I note here a story on the scandal in "The
Village Voice" for May 11 by Robert
Friedman. Since Friedman once wrote "The
Nation" complaining I had credited another reporter
for facts he had unearthed, I must say that I have
a serious problem with the way he avoids giving
credit to anyone but himself. Last July, in "Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs," Gregory Slobodkin broke the story
of AIPAC's smear operation in a story titled "The
Secret Section in Israel's US Lobby That Stifles
American Debate." On August 4, Friedman did a
"Voice" story, "The Israel Lobby's Blacklist."
Nowhere in Friedman's story was it stated that
Slobodkin had already published an account of his
experiences at AIPAC. In his May 11, 1993, piece on the ADL, Friedman
was still boasting that AIPAC's "spy operation was
disclosed last summer in the 'Voice,'" which it
wasn't. And he never thanks his sources or
acknowledges the efforts of people long laboring on
the story, such as journalists in San Francisco or
ABC-TV's James Bamford, who discovered the
Benjamin Epstein letter from which Friedman
quotes without tipping his hat to the journalist
who got the document first. In fact, Friedman relies uncritically on the
statements of ADL spy Roy Bullock to the FBI
and to San Francisco police, as though they were
proven facts. And in the end he lets off the ADL
with a light stroke, courtesy of researcher Chip
Berlet, who says the ADL "is a group whose
leaders, at least, consistently defend the actions
of Israel against critics, which ... is entirely
appropriate" and "is a group that maintains an
information-sharing arrangement with law
enforcement. Again, there is nothing wrong for a
group to do that." Berlet argues that it was some
malign synergy between such ADL functions that led
to trouble. In effect, he OK's the ADL's venomous
smearing of critics as anti-Semites and then makes
the amazing statement that there's nothing wrong
with illegal acquisition and dissemination of
privileged government information about
individuals. This is the basis of the class-action
suit against the ADL in California. | |||
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Current ADL National Director Abraham H Foxman
(right)
write to David Irving