Supporters of A.C.L.U. Call for the
Ouster
of Its Leaders
By STEPHANIE STROM, NYTimes on the Web, September 27, 2006
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Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Anthony D.
Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties
Union, said the organization had never violated its principles.
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New York City, Sept 26 -- More than
30 longtime supporters of the American Civil Liberties Union are calling for the
ouster of the organization’s leadership, saying it has failed to adhere to the
principles it demands of others and thus jeopardized the organization’s
effectiveness.
The new group is made up of donors, former board and staff members, and the
lawyer who won what was perhaps the A.C.L.U.’s most famous legal battle, its
defense of the right of Nazis to march through a predominantly Jewish suburb of
Chicago .
“We come together now, reluctantly but resolutely, not to injure the A.C.L.U.
but to restore its integrity and its consistency of principle,’’ the group said
in a mission statement to be posted on its Web site,
www.savetheaclu.org, which
is to go live today.
The statement does not name individual officials that the group wants to see
removed, but in the past, criticism has been focused on Anthony D. Romero, the
executive director, and Nadine Strossen, the board president, as well as members
of the executive committee.
The Web site, which was first reported in The New York Sun in June, initially
will feature letters from members and donors who have joined the effort, lists
of articles about the A.C.L.U. and ways for readers to join the effort.
“It’s a home for A.C.L.U. loyalists who have been shut out of the organization,”
said Ira Glasser, who was executive director of the organization from 1978 to
2001 and has signed the statement.
Mr. Glasser emphasized that the group, conceived by Alan Kahn, a retired Wall
Street executive and longtime A.C.L.U. member, was an informal one.
“We’re not starting a new organization,” he said. “We’re a protest group, trying
to get the board to exercise its fiduciary and governing responsibility in a way
that it has not. We’re loyal to the existing organization and above all to the
principles it is intended to advance.”
Emily Whitfield, an A.C.L.U. spokeswoman, defended the organization, saying it
continued to fight aggressively for the principles of free speech.
“Our programs, both legal and legislative, have never been stronger,” Ms.
Whitfield said. “And then there’s the phenomenal growth of the A.C.L.U., where
we’ve nearly doubled staff, our revenues are higher, membership and donations
are higher, and that, to us, tell us where we are right now, in terms of our
organization. We’re proud of it.”
She added, “We’re proud to be the leading organization fighting for freedom of
speech on the Internet.”
Ms. Whitfield noted that the A.C.L.U. would go to court next month to argue that
federal efforts to limit access to certain content on the Web to protect
children violated the free speech protection in the Constitution.
And she pointed out that other independent Web sites already reported and
commented on the A.C.L.U., including acluprocon.org and stoptheaclu.com, among
others.
In interviews, some members of the group behind the Web site pointed to internal
controversies that have been made public, starting with an agreement that
obligated the A.C.L.U. to check its staff against government lists of suspected
terrorists to participate in the federal employees’ annual fund-raising drive
known as the Combined Federal Campaign at the same time it was criticizing the
lists.
Since then, controversies have developed over other matters, including questions
about the A.C.L.U.’s use of data mining to profile donors, a plan to monitor its
employees’ e-mail messages and efforts to control board members’ access to staff
and information.
Donors have confronted the organization over proposals that would have
discouraged its board members from publicly criticizing the organization’s
policies and internal administration.
“Any one of those things by itself is unacceptable, but you could say it was an
error in judgment and let it go,” said David Goldberger, a law professor at Ohio
State University, who defended the Nazis’ right to march in Skokie , Ill., when
he worked at the A.C.L.U.’s Illinois affiliate. “But when you start to see more
than one of these kinds of things emerge, then it’s clear that the
organization’s leadership has let it drift away from its core principles, and
without those principles, it has no value.”
The A.C.L.U. has backtracked several times in response to public criticism,
withdrawing from the federal fund-raising effort, filing a lawsuit to get the
requirements changed and returning some grant money, among other things.
Mr. Romero, the executive director, has apologized for “mistakes” but said the
organization had never violated its principles. Controversial proposals, like
the one to monitor employee e-mail, have been withdrawn for further
consideration.
Members of the new group and others, however, say such issues should have never
arisen.
“It does something wrong, then it retracts it after it gets bad publicity, which
is no way to operate,” said Anna Switzer, a longtime A.C.L.U. member from New
York who said she signed onto the mission statement reluctantly. “The problem is
that some of these things should never have been proposed at all.”
John C. Brittain, chief counsel of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under
the Law, was an A.C.L.U. board member and a member of the executive committee
until he was voted out of office last month in what he and others contended was
an election manipulated by the leadership. A.C.L.U. leaders denied the
accusation.
“I agreed to sign on to this effort because I have been inside the A.C.L.U. for
the past five years, nearly, and I’ve tried to address some of the concerns from
within and been rebuffed,” Mr. Brittain said. He said that he did not know about
the opposition effort until after the election and that his support for it had
nothing to do with his ouster from the board.
“I am truly troubled by the direction and governance of the organization,” he
said.
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