Anti-Defamation League SUED

Fifteen civil rights groups and seven individuals filed a federal lawsuit yesterday against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, claiming the Jewish group violated their civil and privacy rights by spying on their activities.

The lawsuit, based in large part on facts that have emerged in a criminal probe of the ADL in San Francisco, not only pits Arab-American groups against the ADL, but several other civil rights groups representing African Americans, Latinos and Jews, as well as various social causes such as the anti-apartheid movement and those opposed to police abuse.

"This is an unusual lawsuit. An organization that has done important civil rights work is being charged with violating civil rights," Albert Mokhiber, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which is the lead plaintiff in the case, said at a news conference.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleges that the ADL "raided the trash of the people on whom it spied, infiltrated meetings and even obtained from the police confidential law enforcement information," Mokhiber said.

Named in the suit is the ADL; its national "fact-finding" director, Irwin Suall; Roy Bullock, a freelance ADL "fact finder" for 25 years, and Tom Gerard, a former San Francisco police inspector who has been charged with giving confidential police information to Bullock. The counties of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego also are named because of allegations that law enforcement officials in those counties provided confidential information to the ADL. Allegations in the separate criminal investigation are to be presented to a grand jury in San Francisco Nov. 3 in a case in which prosecutors plan to allege that ADL officials conspired to obtain legally confidential police material on individual political activists, which is a felony in California.

The case took shape earlier this year when authorities investigating police abuse discovered that Gerard and Bullock kept files on hundreds of groups and individuals across the political spectrum. Those files, plus files taken in searches of the ADL's two California offices, showed the group's attentions had spread far beyond the hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, that were its traditional targets. Instead, the ADL appears to have become concerned about groups of all stripes that did not share its views on Palestine and Israel.

The files were suspicious because many contained legally confidential information, according to court papers. The plaintiffs in yesterday's suit are among the groups and individuals on whom either Gerard, Bullock or the ADL gathered information.

ADL officials have denied the allegations. In a statement yesterday, the group said, "The Anti-Defamation League regards the suit as without merit. The ADL conducts its fact finding seriously, professionally and lawfully. The conspiracy theories outlined in the complaint are completely false and serve only to highlight the plaintiffs' political agenda."

In past interviews on the subject, ADL officials have suggested that those who accuse their organization of unlawful or intrusive "fact finding" are motivated by antisemitism. "The National Lawyers Guild and the other plaintiffs are braced" for such accusations, said John Brittain, the immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild, which also is a plaintiff in the suit.

"We are not here to put the ADL out of business," Mokhiber said. "We are here to put the ADL back into the business of protecting civil rights, not violating them."

Author: Lynne Duke
Date: October 22, 1993
Source::The Washington Post