How The ACLU Lost Its Bearings
Posted on July 2, 2006
In a country that stands for freedom there is an administration that claims to lead the world in the direction of liberty. Whenever there is a vocal critic of this administration they seek to silence and censor them. They put forth efforts to disparage and punish whistle-blowers. They have attempted to secretly use data-mining technologies to monitor people and even reaching down into their personal financial transactions, in essence “flipping through their checkbooks.” To top it all off, this is the administration that runs an organization that claims to be the “defender” of free speech and privacy rights, the ACLU.
A recently replaced board member, Wendy Kaminer, writes a very critical op-ed in today’s LA Times. It includes many political divergences that I disagree with, but the overall point in exposing hypocrisy is on target. After a brief tribute to one of the ACLU’s founding communists, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and how she was ousted by the ACLU for her communist beliefs… Wendy shows the intolerance and hypocrisy of the organization so many on the left hail as heroes. The article is mixed with Bush administration criticism too which is her complete freedom to do, just as it is her freedom to criticize the organization she had put so much hope into and failed her. The main point her article makes is that if an organization is going to criticize certain practices they say jeapardizes our freedom, it greatly undermines their credibility when they engage in those same practices. This is the point in which I whole heartedly agree.
Recently, the ACLU again considered censoring its board members, weighing new rules that would prohibit them from criticizing the organization publicly. This startling proposal was the culmination of a bitter internal battle over the organization’s integrity and fidelity to principle that has spilled out into the media.
Why would such a rule even be considered by a free-speech organization? According to ACLU leaders, some board members had been abusing their right to speak.
They were referring about me and my former colleague on the ACLU board, Michael Meyers, so I don’t approach this subject as an observer. Meyers and I had been threatened last year with removal or suspension after we publicly criticized the ACLU’s reported use of data-mining practices to gather information on members and donors. The effort to punish us was aborted only after a New York Times reporter inquired into it; the board then established a committee on the fiduciary rights and responsibilities of its members in an apparent effort to pass rules that would keep us in line.
The committee’s proposal, issued in May, was a stunning repudiation of the ACLU’s core principles. It included provisions that prohibited board members from criticizing the ACLU board or staff publicly and that disparaged whistle-blowing (conduct the ACLU often applauds when it occurs in other institutions). Individual board members were admonished not to “call into question the integrity of the process in arriving at the board’s decision.”
The proposal has been derailed, at least for now, by its exposure in the media: ACLU members and supporters reacted to news of it with dismay; the New York attorney general’s office reportedly expressed concerns about limitations on public policy discussions; and the organization’s leaders quickly distanced themselves from this effort to squelch dissent.
Unfortunately, this embarrassing episode is part of a pattern. In the last two years, under the leadership of Executive Director Anthony Romero and President Nadine Strossen, the ACLU has repeatedly been caught practicing the opposite of what it preaches.
So for all of you that have sent me emails crying that it is the ACLU that would protect my very right to criticize them, I ask you…where were they when some of their own members and supporters attempted to do so? They were not defending them. They were doing the opposite.
In response to these and other revelations, the ACLU leadership took aim at the messengers. (I’ve been called names on an ACLU listserv that I can’t repeat in this newspaper.) They also obscured the facts, spreading misinformation among board members and supporters. The damaging revelation that Romero had agreed to engage in post-9/11 blacklisting, for example, was “managed” partly by Romero’s misrepresentation of the advice he had been given by lawyers regarding the agreement he had signed. Everyone makes mistakes, of course; what turns mistakes into misconduct are efforts to cover them up.
This is how an organization loses its moral bearings: Its members are caught between loyalty to the institution and loyalty to the institution’s ideals. Supporters of the Romero/Strossen administration blame the ACLU’s internal critics for lending comfort to its enemies on the right at a moment when civil liberties are gravely imperiled. In making that argument, they mirror the Bush administration when it equates criticism of its policies with aid to terrorists at a moment when our security is gravely in doubt.
When the ACLU acts like the government, it undermines its credibility in criticizing the government. Having vilified their own internal critics as “leakers,” ACLU leaders risk incurring charges of hypocrisy if they now try to defend whistle-blowers and publication of leaked information about the Bush administration’s arguably illegal activities.
This is where Wendy went into some political points we could argue with. However her main point is on target. For those that defend the ACLU for standing by their principles I ask…what principles are they standing on? Is it the anti-Bush principles that so many other liberals stand on? This often seems to be the only consistent principle I see. For those that actually oppose the practices of the Bush administration, you should also be as loud in criticizing the ACLU’s practices. If you are truly concerned about your privacy rights and prying eyes into your financial transactions and history I would think twice before donating to an organization that violates those principles. If you support free speech, I suggest you think three times before supporting an organization that is drowning in double standards.
» Filed Under 1st Amendment, ACLU, News
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