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| Is the Anti-Defamation League of
B'nai B'rith Spying on You? Are you being watched? Is information about your First Amendment activities being sent covertly to alien intelligence agencies? Have secret files been compiled on you? A major scandal, centered around ex-San Francisco Police Inspector Tom Gerard, a shadowy character named Roy Bullock, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) suggests that American liberals, and others, may be under surveillance. Evidence seized by the police indicates that numerous progressives activists, newspapers, elected officials, and labor unions-are the targets of a domestic snooping operation. Its legality, and scope, are now being tested and examined in a civil rights case filed in a state court in San Francisco. Gerard has been charged in San Francisco with theft of government property and conspiracy. He is suspected of having collected privileged material on many residents and organizations in the Bay Area. He turned the information over to Bullock. Gerard was introduced to Bullock in the San Francisco office of the ADL. An antique dealer, Bullock, has been the ADL's top "investigator" for more than three decades. The ADL paid him over $170,000 between 1985 and 1992 for his cloak-and-dagger work. Bullock liked to pick through the garbage of his victims, and once
infiltrated an Arab-American delegation that visited Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) in her Washington, D.C. Office. (Pelosi is the daughter of
Baltimore's late Mayor Thomas J. The ADL boasts of keeping its eye on extreme right-wing groups, like the Skinheads, the Ku Klux Klan, and Aryan Nations. Their role in this mess indicates they may have reached too far in search for "Anti-Semites." Police found files on the African National Congress: the ACLU: Irish Americans; the United Auto Workers; AIDS activist groups like ACT-UP; Mother Jones magazine; Pacifica News Network; Lesbian Agenda for Action; Greenpeace; Christic Institute; Rep. Roy Dellums (D-CA); the National Lawyers Guild; NAACP; CISPES; Carpenters Local 22; Jews for Jesus; and many Arab and Palestinian individuals and organizations. The ADL had denied any wrongdoing in the growing scandal. Gerard has pleaded "not guilty" and released on $20,000 bail. Bullock has not been charged. The probe is continuing. Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, lashed out at the San Francisco district attorney for "trying us in the media, " according to an interview he gave to the Northern California Bulletin, a local Jewish weekly. Foxman said the ADL would continue to monitor people or groups that "pose a threat to Jews" and defended the organization's probe of the African National Congress on grounds the ANC "were violent, they were anti-Semitic, they were pro-PLO, and they were anti-Israel." (See The Washington Report on the Middle East magazine,08/93). The ADL was founded in 1913 for the declared purpose of defending Jews against "defamation." For the most part, their record over the years has been a laudable one. During the Reagan years, however, the ADL made a noticeable turn to the Right. Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal, a respected author and anti-Zionist, said, "What exactly constitutes anti-Semitism was to receive continually different interpretations. With the creation of Israel in 1948, the meaning of the word was broadened and eventually, totally distorted." (The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 07/93). Irwin Suall presently runs the ADL's "fact finding" division out of their national office at the United Nations Plaza in Manhattan. It operates in all 50 states and has 31 regional offices, and it works closely with state and federal police forces. It has over 400 employees and an annual budget of around $32 million. In a memo dated July, 1992, Suall praised Roy Bullock as "our number one investigator." He was also quoted as saying that the real enemies of the Jews are on the "American Left." (Robert I. Friedman's 'The Enemy Within', Village Voice, 05/11/93). On April 8, 1993, a detailed report on this brouhaha was presented on ABC's "Nightly News" before a national audience estimated at over 18 million. This expose first ran in the print media in the San Francisco Examiner and was later taken up by the Los Angeles Times. Alexander Cockburn has been doing a running and biting commentary on it in the pages of The Nation. In his riveting account of the affair, Friedman made this damning statement: "Once a proud human rights organization, the ADL had become the Jewish Thought Police." The ADL sharply disagrees with that assessment. They see themselves as an altruistic human rights organization dedicated to watching out for the kooks and fringe groups in our society. Ex-US Rep. Pete McCloskey (R-CA) has filed a class action lawsuit in a California court against the ADL, charging invasion of privacy. His name also appears in the data base, along with that of his wife. McCloskey has been a persistent critic of Israel's brutal suppression of the 1.8 million Palestinians languishing in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The son of the former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens, Yigal Arens, is also a plaintiff in the suit. Arens supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The ADL believes," said Arens, "that anyone who is an Arab-American or who speaks politically against Israel is at least a closet anti-Semite." (See also, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, (06/93). The civil suit claims that the ADL collected information on opponents of Israeli and South African government policies and passed it on to those countries. The ADL has denied all the charges in the suit and has promised a vigorous defense. It says it does not condone illegal methods of obtaining information. Bullock had his computer-based data divided into four categories: "Right Wing", "Pinkos", "Arab and Skinhead" organizations. About 4,000 of the files are on Arab-Americans; the rest are on groups and individuals as diverse as the Assembly of Jesus; Boycott Coke; Black United Fund; the Weatherman Underground; and the United Farm Workers. Bullock admits to selling some of his ADL files on anti-Apartheid activists to South African intelligence agents. He also had ties to a group of informants across the country with code names, like "Scumbag", "Ironside", and "Flipper". Attorney Marc Van de Hout of the National Lawyers Guild, which is
listed in the ADL's files, said, "I am a Jew myself, and when I see the
breath of the organizations in these files that the ADL has conducted
surveillance on, it is very clear that they have sort of lost touch with
reality in terms of organizations that are engaged in real anti-Semitic
activity." (See Washington Report, 08/93). As Doug Struck's recent
insightful reporting in the Baltimore Sun amply demonstrates, the Israeli
crackdown in the occupied territories has resulted in gross abuses of human
rights, including the "torture of Palestinian prisoners." Americans should
have the right to complain about Israeli wrongdoing, about their huge annual
raids on our national treasury ($11.3 billion in 1993), or their
controversial trial of John Demjanjuk, without ending up in a file of the
ADL or under surveillance. I think it is wrong for the ADL, or any other
private group, to appoint itself as the pseudo-guardian of our civil
liberties. The ADL, however, like any other defendant, is entitled to its
day in court and to present its side of this mounting controversy to an
objective fact finder." (End of article.)
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