Bill of rights' implausible defenders: don't look to the ACLU and its left-wing allies to defend your liberty and the constitution against the encroaching police state. (On the Home Front).

An incredible deception is underway. Ultra-leftist groups with long histories of supporting totalitarianism are posing as the chief defenders of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights against the current onslaught of police-state legislation. The Establishment media, of course, are assisting these pro-Communist poseurs, led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

One of the more high-profile efforts in this deception campaign involves getting city governments to pass resolutions registering opposition to the police-state dangers posed by the USA PATRIOT Act, the Homeland Security Act, and other legislation and executive orders ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism. Local Bill Of Rights Defense Committees (BORDC) led by the ACLU, NLG, and CCR cadres are sponsoring these resolutions.

"Nearly two dozen cities around the country have passed resolutions urging federal authorities to respect the civil rights of local citizens when fighting terrorism," the New York Times reported on December 23rd. "Efforts to pass similar measures are under way in more than 60 other places," the story continued. According to the report in the Times, most of the resolutions have passed in liberal bastions like Boulder, Cob.; Santa Fe, N.M.; Cambridge, Mass.; and California "people's republics" like Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Oakland. But, it notes, "less ideological places have also acted, with more localities considering it, from big cities like Chicago and Tampa, Fla., to smaller ones like Fairbanks, Alaska, and Grants Pass, Ore."

Controlling the Opposition

The federal government's expanding police powers should certainly concern freedom-loving Americans, especially since the September 11th terrorist attacks. But the ACLU and its leftist cohorts are improbable champions to oppose this dangerous trend. They are, in fact, controlled opposition, whose goals are the opposite of their publicly professed purpose.

"The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is our nation's guardian of liberty," declares the ACLU Internet home page, "working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." The organization's record, however, belies these claims. The ACLU is integrally interlocked with both the street-level revolutionaries ostensibly opposing the Homeland Security Act and the Establishment revolutionaries designing and promoting it. The most important tie-in illustrating the ACLU's dual-purpose role is its top-level connections to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the one-world power elite's principal operational front.

The ACLU has pointed to the Orwellian Big Brother potential of the Homeland Security Act (HSA) to boost recruitment and raise funds. Apparently this scam is working; the organization claims that its membership has jumped to an all-time high, and funds are pouring in. What the ACLU does not point out is the close relationship of its top players to the CFR architects who gave us the HSA. The HSA and the mammoth new Homeland Security Department created by the legislation originated with the CFR-spawned Hart-Rudman Commission. Known formally as the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, the Hart-Rudman Commission was established in 1998 at the urging of President Clinton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, both members of the CFR. The commission, co-chaired by former Senators Gary Hart (CFR) and Warren Rudman (CFR), proposed what Congress has essentially adopted and President Bush has signed.

The ACLU's leadership is well represented in the CFR's membership rolls and works closely with this Insider brain trust. ACLU president Nadine Strossen is a CFR member. So is ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero, a homosexual activist attorney who previously was a top staff member at the Ford Foundation, the CER-directed revolutionary cash cow providing funding to the ACLU. Stanley Sheinbaum, the longtime patriarch of the ACLU of Southern California, one of the organization's most influential chapters, is also a CFR member. So is Morton Halpenn, the Marxist revolutionary who, for many years, ran the ACLU's project to neuter our police and security agencies. President Clinton tried to appoint Halperin to a top Defense Department post, but was prevented from doing so when this magazine and others exposed the nominee s ultra-radical, pro-Communist, pro-terrorist record.

In 1996, ACLU President Nadine Strossen was one of three CFR panelists on the council's program, "Combating Terrorism: What Works? What Doesn't?" This conference, broadcast over C-SPAN, provided an even earlier trial balloon than Hart-Rudman to measure the American public's response to proposals for draconian measures to fight terrorism.

Subversive Record

These ACLU connections to the silk-hat revolutionaries in the CFR have never been well known, but the organization's notorious record with regard to Communist, subversive, and terrorist groups was once fairly common knowledge. Much of this has been all but forgotten, thanks to the media cartel's Orwellian memory hole. From its beginnings to the present, the ACLU has been not a champion of, but a dangerous enemy to, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

In 1931, a congressional report of the Special House Committee to Investigate Communist Activities stated:

The American Civil Liberties Union is closely affiliated with the communist movement in the United States, and fully 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of communists who have come into conflict with the law. It claims to stand for free speech, free press, and free assembly; but it is quite apparent that the main function of the ACLU is to attempt to protect the communists in their advocacy of force and violence to overthrow the government, replacing the American flag by a red flag and erecting a Soviet government in place of the republican form of government guaranteed to each state by the federal Constitution.

The House committee members had good reason to arrive at that conclusion. The ACLU's membership, leadership, and projects soon gave rise to claims by critics that the organization's acronym really stood for Atheists, Communists, and Libertines United, or Anti-Christian Lawyers Union. The ACLU was launched at a party given for Roger Baldwin upon his release from prison for draft evasion in 1919. The main attendees at the soiree were Norman Thomas, who would become the patriarch of the Socialist Party; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who would become the Communist Party's national chairman; and Agnes Smedley, who would become a Soviet espionage agent in China. Top Communist Party officials who became national committee members or members of its board of directors included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Z. Foster, Louis Budenz, Corliss Lamont, and Scott Nearing, as well as hundreds of Communist fellow travelers.

Roger Baldwin directed the ACLU for 30 years. Earlier, he described his own philosophy this way in his college yearbook: "I am for Socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the State itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal." He gave no evidence of ever having swerved from that goal. However, he did give his comrades good advice on effective stratagems for disguising their true intent.

In 1917, Baldwin wrote to Louis Lochner of the People's Council. a Communist group, counseling:

Do steer away from making it [the People's Council] look like a Socialist enterprise. Too many people have already gotten the idea that it is nine-tenths a Socialist movement.... We want also to look like patriots in everything we do. We want to get a lot of good flags, talk a good deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of this country, and to show that we are the folks that really stand for the spirit of our institutions.

The ACLU has perfected this masquerade, posing as the Constitution's guardian while working to destroy it and the morality, responsibility, and decentralized, local governance essential to our constitutional system. The organization defends abortion on demand, child pornography, flag burning, homosexual "marriages" and the right of homosexuals to adopt children, full "constitutional" rights for illegal aliens, and legalizing prostitution, pandering, and all recreational drug usage. It opposes private ownership of guns, voluntary school prayer, religious displays on public property, capital punishment, prison terms for most crimes, and tax-exemptions for churches and synagogues.

For decades, the ACLU has worked hand-in-glove with the National Lawyers Guild, officially cited by a committee of Congress as "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party." Both of these groups have been striving since the early 20th century to undermine all U.S. immigration and internal security protections. The easy access across our borders enjoyed by the 9-11 hijackers is largely a testament to the nonstop attacks by the ACLU-NLG saboteurs upon the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol, and our immigration laws.

Following the September 11th terror attacks, the ACLU and NLG activists have continued their subversion. One of their most outrageous ongoing campaigns has been to support members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a radical, Marxist branch of the PLO. The INS had tried since 1987 to deport eight members of this terrorist group from the U.S., but had been stymied by the continuous appeals and legal delaying tactics of the ACLU-NLG attorneys. Working with Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the ACLU-NLG radicals fashioned language to the USA PATRIOT Act to exempt the members of the terrorist PFLP whom the INS was trying to deport. This showed unequivocally that the ACLU has not changed its spots. By undermining our internal security, the ACLU is actually helping fasten federal police-state measures on the 99.99 percent of Americans who present no terrorist threat, while protecting the small minority of terrorists and their supporters whom law enforcement agencies should be targeting.

By usurping the mantle of leadership of the opposition to the growing police state, the ACLU's current deception campaign provides a double effect. First, it scares many conservatives familiar with the group's radical record into more readily accepting the Bush administration's dangerous measures concentrating more and more power in Washington. The pseudo-conservative columnists and radio talk shows supporting the Bush agenda are having a field day denouncing all opponents as liberal ACLU dupes. On the other hand, patriotic Americans who have strong constitutional principles, but are unfamiliar with the ACLU's sordid record and the role it is playing, may be tempted to join the ACLU-led opposition parade. Both of these false alternatives must be rejected.