Los
Angeles Court Hands Down Final Judgment in
Anti-Defamation League Illegal Surveillance Case
The ADL became a
clearinghouse for illegally obtained and
retained information.
By Michael Gillespie
The American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) versus the
Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai
B'rith (ADL)
litigation resulting from the 1993
ADL
spy scandal was
settled in a California federal court on Monday,
Sept. 27 [2000] following nearly six
years of legal wrangling.
"The ADL was running a major espionage
organization against progressive groups in the
United States." said Hussein Ibish, media
director for the ADC, the Arab-American
organization that provided leadership in the
class action suit representing over 800 groups
and individuals targeted by the ADL.
The settlement is an important victory in the
effort to curtail espionage activity by the ADL,
which, with an annual budget of some $45
million, is still the best funded American
Jewish group and one that, prior to the 1993
domestic spying scandal, had sought recognition
as a national civil rights monitoring
organization.
"Under the permanent
injunction issued by Federal Judge Richard
Paez, the ADL is permanently enjoined
from engaging in any further illegal spying
against Arab-American and other civil rights
groups," said Ibish. The ADL is also required
to provide an annual statement to the court
and ADC's legal counsel in years to come
explaining the measures it is taking to
remain in compliance with the court
order.
A court-appointed Special Master will
supervise the removal of illegally obtained
information from the ADL's files. Those
documents will be held by the Special Master for
a maximum period of 10 years, time to allow the
adjudication of other, related civil suits still
pending against the ADL. The ADL also will
contribute $25,000 to a jointly administered
community relations fund. More significant was
the judge's order to ADL to pay $175,000 for the
plaintiffs' legal fees.
The Arab-American group's lead counsel,
Peter Schey of the Center for Human
Rights and Constitutional Law, characterized the
ADL's sharing of illegally obtained confidential
law enforcement information with Israeli,
apartheid South African and other foreign and
domestic intelligence organizations as
antagonistic to positive social change. "The
work the ADL was doing was not civil rights
work," said Schey, "it was
anti-civil rights
work."
After COINTELPRO, a still-controversial FBI
operation to destabilize black nationalist and
other groups in the '60s and '70s, the FBI,
state and local law enforcement authorities were
ordered out of the business of gathering
information about legitimate political activity
by American citizens. But in some major American
cities, law enforcement files relating to
legitimate and Constitutionally protected
political activities that had been ordered
destroyed instead found their way to the offices
of the ADL, which quickly became a clearinghouse
for such illegally obtained and illegally
retained information.
The absence of the FBI, state, and local
police investigators in the field therefore
created a void the ADL rushed to fill, with
remarkable success, by increasing its in-house
"fact-finding" assets and capabilities and
developing enhanced working relationships with
"official friends'' -- government officials,
investigators, and intelligence officers. Some
of these were the officials who had not
destroyed files of illegally obtained materials,
or had made private copies of the official files
before they were destroyed in compliance with
the court order.
AN INTELLIGENCE CONDUIT
The ADL favored many of its "official
friends'" with expense-paid trips to Israel,
where they met with and were entertained by
friendly officers of Israel's espionage and
counter-intelligence organizations, Mossad and
Shin Bet, thus creating a major conduit for the
flow of sensitive and useful U.S. domestic
political intelligence to Israel's spymasters in
Tel Aviv.
Knowledgeable observers have characterized
the San Francisco district attorney's 1993
investigation of the ADL as a continuation by
proxy of an investigation begun more than two
years earlier by FBI counterintelligence
officials. Their apparent aim was to impede if
not halt the activities of the ADL's
sophisticated nation-wide espionage and
intelligence gathering network.
"Government investigators or private
investigators, there is no lesser of two evils
here. No one should be doing that kind of work,"
said Schey. "The ease with which the ADL moved
into a position of gathering information on
groups not threatening to them was insidious.
They really got sucked into this intelligence
subculture and went into the service of war
policy, especially in Central America."
On the domestic level, Schey characterized
the ADL's shift from civil rights monitoring to
espionage and intelligence-gathering as
intolerable. "That they would turn their
capabilities on people and groups engaged in
legitimate civil rights causes -- any measure
that's outrageous conduct for an organization
that presents itself as a civil rights
organization. They were targeting everyone from
the Asian Law Caucus to the United Farm
Workers."
"Why the hell was ADL watching Greenpeace or
the National Conference of Black Lawyers?" asked
Ibish. "It doesn't make sense for ADL to want
that kind of information, but a national
security organization like Mossad would, of
course. They spied on everyone within reach,
left, right, and center. Their actions, methods,
and means are typical of a national espionage
organization but unprecedented for a civil
rights organization. Why was ADL behaving like
an espionage organization?
"The permanent injunction is tacit admission
that they were spying," said Ibish. "They can't
deny what they have promised to stop doing. The
injunction ought to have an effect on any
sensible organization. Of course, if the
connection with the Mossad is a factor, the
injunction probably won't have much effect."
The ADL continues to deny any wrongdoing. An
ADL press release proclaims that the League is
"pleased to finally resolve the litigation" in a
manner that "explicitly recognizes the ADL's
right to gather information in any lawful and
Constitutionally-protected manner, which we have
always done and will continue to do."
No other major
American Jewish organization has condemned
the ADL for its political excesses or its
documented association with Israeli
intelligence organizations.
Schey said the ADL developed a completely
distorted view of who presents a threat to the
Jewish community in the U.S., describing "such
an isolationist vision that it perceived a wide
range of ethnic communities as threatening,
assigning them to an 'enemy camp.' Many of those
groups might disagree with the ADL on the Middle
East. for example, but they might agree on many
other issues. The way the ADL drew boundaries
was completely irrational."
Disappointingly, the mainstream American
media have devoted little ink and less airtime
to the settlement of this major civil rights
case. "The settlement is being ignored by the
mainstream press, charged Ibish. "We had hoped
the press would understand the importance of
this case without our reminding them, but that
has not happened. The Jewish press is taking it
more seriously."
The case was settled in a Los Angeles federal
court, but the Los Angeles
Times gave the story a mere 281 words in
a news summary in its Sept. 28 Metro Home
Edition. And although the investigation involved
files stolen from the San Francisco police
department, the San
Francisco Chronicle also buried its brief
account of the court's decision.
The apparent disinterest of San Francisco and
Los Angeles reporters in a local story of such
importance is all the more astonishing in view
of the ADL's systematic violation of privacy and
the broad targeting of its intelligence
gathering effort which, in addition to the
organizations named above, included Artists
Against Apartheid, ACT UP, Action for Animals,
the Asian Law Caucus of San Francisco, the
American Indian Movement (AIM) and, among
hundreds of individuals, a number of prominent
elected officials and public figures. The ADL
conducted covert surveillance of many groups and
individuals and, through its "official friends,"
illegally accessed confidential government and
law enforcement files to obtain fingerprints,
photos, social security numbers, drivers'
license numbers and information, vehicle
registration and license plate numbers, post
office box numbers, and other information not
legally available to the public.
Roy Bullock, an espionage operative
working out of the ADL's San Francisco office
and in the employ of the group for more than 30
years, was paid through a secret ADL bank
account held in a false name and controlled by
Bruce Hochman, a prominent Beverly Hills
lawyer, former federal prosecutor and former
president of the Jewish Federation Council of
Greater Los Angeles.
Among co-plaintiffs with ADC in the suit were
former Congressman Melvin Dymally, former
Los Angeles City Councilor Robert
Farrell, the National Conference of Black
Lawyers, the National Lawyers Guild, the Bay
Area Anti-Apartheid Network, the National
Association of Arab American University
Graduates (AAUG), the Coalition Against Police
Abuse, the Committee in Solidarity With the
People of El Salvador, Global Exchange, the
International Jewish Peace Union, AIM and the
Palestine Solidarity Committee.
Still pending adjudication are at least two
additional civil cases that arose as a result of
the 1993 spy scandal and media revelations of
illegal ADL espionage activities in California
and beyond.
Michael
Gillespie is a freelance journalist based
in Ames, Iowa. He writes frequently about
politics and media.
write to David Irving