-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.counterpunch.org/adlspying2.html
}}}>Begin
February 25, 2002
The ADL Spying Case Is Over,
But The Struggle Continues
By Jeffrey Blankfort, Anne Poirier
and Steve Zeltzer
Plaintiffs in the of ADL Spying Case
In 1993, the District of Attorney of San Francisco released 700 pages of documents
implicating the Anti- Defamation League, an organization that claims to be a
defender of civil rights, in a vast spying operation directed against American citizens
who were opposed to Israel's policies in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza and to
the apartheid policies of the government of South Africa and passing on information
to both governments.
Under great political pressure, Smith later dropped the charges. One wonders what
would have happened had an Arab-American or Muslim organization been caught
spying with the names of 10,000 people and 600 organizations in their files.
Not only were critics of Israel under ADL's surveillance,including thousands of Arab-
Americans, but labor organizations such as the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU
Local 10, and the Oakland Educational Association, and civil rights groups such as
the NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council and the Asian Law
Caucus were also found in the "pinko" files of ADL's undercover operative, Roy
Bullock.
Moreover, Bullock, who had worked, off the books, for the ADL for more than 25
years, admitted that he had been reporting on the activities of black South African
exiles and American anti- apartheid activists for South African intelligence.
Bullock, pretending to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, came to the founding
meeting of the Labor Committee of the Middle in 1987 at the home of plaintiff Steve
Zeltzer, having met Zeltzer at meetings of the Free Moses Mayekiso Defense
Committee, a South African labor solidarity committee in which he also infiltrated
under false pretenses.
Having been responsible for exposing Bullock as an ADL agent to the media, we
joined together with other Bay Area activists in filing a suit against the ADL for
violation of our privacy rights as provided in California law.
Almost a decade later the suit has been settled with a significant cash payment by
the ADL and, we wish to emphasize, without our signing any agreement for
confidentiality which the ADL had previously demanded. Our efforts to expose the
organization's work in defending the policies of the Israeli government and stifling
its
opponents will continue, using new information gained in the pursuance of the suit.
The ADL spent millions of dollars preventing this case from coming to trial through
costly appeals and exploiting the judicial process but, at the end, it had to give up..
During the course of the suit we learned that:
Bullock, the ADL's top "fact finder" had sold confidential information to a South
African intelligence agent in San Francisco for $15,000.
Ten days before he was assassinated in South Africa, Chris Hani, the man who
would have succeeded Nelson Mandela as the country's president, was trailed by
Bullock on a trip through California who reported on it to the South African
government.
ADL agent Roy Bullock was discovered to have a floor plan of murdered Los Angeles
Arab American leader Alex Odeh and a key to his office.
The ADL supplied confidential information to foreign governments that it obtained
from police and federal agencies in the US,
Having infiltrated the American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee (ADC), the
ADL's "fact finder" performed a COINTEL-type operation at the convention of the
Holocaust-denying Journal of Historical Review when he put ADC's literature on
convention tables as a way of smearing the committee for "working with anti-
Semites."
The ADL has organized to silence and eliminate all critical voices of Israel from
academia and the media and has targeted professors , particularly those who are
African American, and who are critical of Israel.
That at least 51% of the activities of its San Francisco office were devoted to
defending Israel.
The ADL provided secret files to police agencies when these police agencies were
prevented by law from collecting the files themselves,
Many questions must still be answered about the activities of the ADL and it's non-
profit status as an "education organization". The settlement offered by the ADL is
recognition on its part that it could not afford to go to a trial in front of a jury
and face
the likelihood that more of its dirty secrets would be revealed.
We call on all people to make sure that these practices on the part of the ADL are
not allowed to continue and that the double standard that presently dominates this
country on issues dealing with Israel be eliminated.
Finally, we wish to thank our attorney, former congressman Pete McCloskey, himself
a victim of the ADL and the Israel Lobby, for his years of work on our behalf and his
steadfast commitment to the pursuit of justice.
Jeffrey Blankfort can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more information on this case read CounterPunch's story, ADL Snoops: Were
the Spies "Journalists"?
End<{{{
From
http://www.counterpunch.org/adlspies.html
}}}>Begin
Were the Spies "Journalists"?
The ADL Snoops
The organization's main "fact-finder" was doubling as a spy for the white South
African government while his buddy, a San Francisco cop who had tutored El
Salvadoran death squads on the finer aspects of torture, was providing its officials
with personal information on the organization's putative enemies when the story
broke in San Francisco in December, 1992. The organization was the Anti-
Defamation League.
The ADL claims to be the nation's leading defender against prejudice and bigotry but
in this instance its targets were members of the African National Congress and its
supporters, and apparently everyone, Arab and non-Arab, who had the temerity to
criticize Israel. This included some who drove to Arab community events where the
ADL's "fact-finder," Roy Bullock, and the cop, Tom Gerard, took turns writing down
their license plate numbers, which Gerard turned into addresses thanks to his
access to California motor vehicle records.
Their spying efforts proved to be part of a much larger intelligence gathering
operation that targeted some 12,000 individuals and more than 600 left-of-center
organizations in northern California.
After the first flurry of publicity, the ADL's spin doctors successfully kept the story
from receiving the national coverage that the situation warranted. But the story hasn't
gone away.
Last November the California Court of Appeals handed down a decision that paves
the way for a major test later this year of the ADL's penchant for spying on its
enemies. It was the most significant episode in a slow-moving class-action case filed
in 1993 by 19 pro- Palestinian and anti-apartheid activists who claim to be victims of
the ADL's snooping operations.
The plaintiffs say they were illegally spied on by Bullock, then considered the ADL's
top "fact-finder" by his now deceased chief, Irwin Suall, and that such spying
constituted an invasion of privacy under the provisions of the California Constitution.
The ADL's defense, accepted by the court in 1994, is that the Jewish defense
organization is, collectively, a "journalist" and, therefore, can legally engage in
information-gathering activities regardless of the source. At question was access by
the plaintiffs to information contained in 10 boxes of files seized by the San
Francisco
police from the ADL's San Francisco office in April, 1993, and placed under court
seal where the ADL has fought fiercely to keep them. In the years since then, efforts
by the court to settle the case have foundered on the ADL's refusal to allow
potentially embarrassing depositions taken by plaintiffs' lawyer ex-Congressman Paul
(Pete) McCloskey of Bullock, ADL officials and police officers to be be made public
and its files opened. The plaintiffs have been unwilling to compromise on either of
these issues.
Then, in September, 1997, Judge Alex Saldamondo ruled that McCloskey's clients
were entitled to see what the ADL had on them in its files. Two plaintiffs, Jeffrey
Blankfort and Steve Zeltzer, co-founders of the Labor Committee on the Middle East,
who had "outed" Bullock as an ADL spy after he infiltrated their group in 1987,
received an extract of their files from the DA's office the day before they were
ordered sealed. Both contain illegally obtained information, much of which, say
Blankfort and Zeltzer, is erroneous.
When ADL's appeal of that decision was rejected by Court of Appeals Judge
Anthony Kline, the ADL persuaded the State Supreme Court to return the case to the
full court for a hearing. On November 15, 1998, the court reaffirmed ADL's status as
a journalist and acknowledged its right to maintain files and obtain information on all
but two of the remaining plaintiffs on the basis that they are "limited-purpose public
figures", which it defined as having been publicly engaged and identified in activities
around a particular issue, in this instance opposition to Israeli occupation and/or
South African apartheid. There is no protection, said the court, for obtaining
information illegally on non-public figures.
The court made an important qualification, however, ruling that for "limited purpose"
figures, the journalist's shield only applies if the information obtained is to be
used for
journalistic purposes. It does not protect the ADL from charges that it passed
information about the plaintiffs to "foreign governments (in this instance, Israel or
South Africa) or to others", which is what the plaintiffs claim the ADL has done.
Although the Court of Appeals vacated Judge Saldamando's decision, it did state
that representatives of the plaintiffs had the right to request a review of ADL's
files to
discover possible constitutional violations, each of which would be worth $2500.
While this may seem a small sum, there are hundreds of Arab-Americans and anti-
apartheid activists whose names appear in the ADL's files who potentially could
collect if the ADL loses in court or is forced to settle the case.
The origins of the story are murky. What the press reported was that the SFPD acted
on a tip from the FBI, which was supposedly concerned about files on the Nation of
Islam that were stolen from its local office, and arrested Gerard, who allegedly had
done the pilfering. In Gerard's computer they found files on more than 7,000
individuals, many of them Arab- Americans, as well as information on hundreds of
left-to-liberal organizations filed by Gerard as "pinko". In his locker, they found a
black executioner's hood, a number of photos of dark-skinned men bound and
blindfolded, CIA manuals, a secret document on interrogation techniques, stamped
"secret" and referring to El Salvador, and numerous passports and IDs in a variety of
names, all with his picture.
This splendid fellow began meeting with Richard Hirschhaut, chief of the ADL's San
Francisco office in 1986, during which, according to a "confidential" Hirschhaut
memo to the aforementioned ADL chief "fact-finder" Suall, he provided "a significant
amount of information" on "the activities of specific Arab organizations and
individuals in the Bay Area". That memo hasn't been made public but what was
reported created a nightmare for the ADL when it turned out that Gerard had been
exchanging non-public, personal information from government files with Bullock, a
paid informant for the ADL since 1954 and whose own computerized "pinko" files on
leftish and liberal folks, when seized by the police, proved to be a third again as
large
as Gerard's. According to police, his computer contained the names of nearly 12,000
individuals, 77 Arab-American organizations, 29 anti-apartheid organizations, and
more than 600 "pinko" groups which included such revolutionary outfits as the
NAACP, Asian Law Caucus and SANE/FREEZE, as well as 20 Bay area labor
unions including the SF Labor Council. There were in addition, files on 612 right-wing
organizations and 27 skinhead groups.
According to SF police inspector Ron Roth, 75 percent of their contents was non-
public information illegally obtained from government agencies.
After indicating that the ADL would be charged with violating the California's
Business and Profession's code, SF District Attorney Arlo Smith did an extraordinary
thing. He made available to the public, merely for the copying costs, some 700 pages
of documents incriminating the ADL in a nation-wide intelligence gathering operation
run out of New York by Suall. One of the significant parts of that report was Bullock's
admission that he was paid by a South African intelligence agent to spy on anti-
apartheid activists (which he was already doing for the ADL.) He had reported on a
visit to California by the ANC's Chris Hani, ten days before the man expected by
many to succeed Nelson Mandela, returned home to be brutally murdered.
The ADL attempted to portray Bullock as a free-lance investigator, but no one was
convinced, because since 1954 Bullock had been paid through a cutout, an ADL
lawyer in Beverly Hills. After his exposure, Bullock was put directly on the ADL's
payroll. ADL's position on the ANC was identical to that of the South African
government - they considered it to be a "terrorist", "communist" organization. At the
time, Israel was furnishing arms to maintain the apartheid regime in power.
In1994, Smith announced that he would not prosecute either the ADL or Bullock
since it would be "expensive and time-consuming both to the SFDA and the
defendants," a curious judgement considering the overwhelming evidence in his
possession.
In its settlement with the city, the ADL, admitted no wrongdoing, agreed to restrain
their operatives from seeking non-public data on ADL's enemies from government
agencies and, putting a happy face on the story, promised to create a $25,000 Hate
Crimes Fund and another $25,000 for a public school course.
Another class-action case filed by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
and other spied-upon groups such as CISPES, the Bay Area Anti-Apartheid Network
and the National Lawyers Guild, was settled in 1996, also under conditions favorable
to the ADL, but without the approval of some of the suing groups.
In that instance, again without admitting wrongdoing or opening its files, the ADL
agreed: to remove questionably obtained information from its files; that it would not
seek non-public information on individuals from government employees and would
pay $25,000 to a fund to improve relations among Jews, blacks and other minorities.
A similar deal was offered to McCloskey's plaintiffs but they turned it down since it
would let the ADL off the hook and allow its secrets to be kept intact.
Both sides will be back in Judge Saldamando's court in March to hear a new
discovery motion from McCloskey and probably to set a trial date, something the
ADL has been trying to avoid, given the embarrassment that would inevitably ensue,
whatever the outcome. Its latest ploy has been to ask the judge for a summary
judgement, in other words, dismissal of the case, something he is unlikely to do.
The deaths of veteran journalists Colin Edwards and George Green reduced the
number of plaintiffs by two and subsequently four others, whose political activities
were relatively limited, were dropped from the case. McCloskey, himself a victim of
ADL attacks and whose wife Helen is one of the plaintiffs, is pursuing the case pro
bono. Typically he is faced in court by four or five lawyers for the ADL. Contributions
for the plaintiffs may be sent to Paul N. McCloskey, Jr. Atty., 333 Bradford St.,
Redwood City, CA 94063 (For more information see: http://www.adlwatch.org or e-
mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED]) CP
CounterPunch
3220 N Street, NW, Suite 346
Washington, DC 20007
1-800-840-3683
email:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
© Copyright: 1998-1999. All rights reserved.
CounterPunch is a project of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity
End<{{{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe
simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not
believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men.
Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all.
Then accept it and live up to it."
The Buddha on Belief, from the Kalama Sutta
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless
of frontiers."
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will
teach you to keep your mouth shut."
--- Ernest Hemingway
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
