Headlines, Human Rights, North America

U.S.: Civil Liberties Group Rejects Charity With Anti-Terror Ties

Eli Clifton

WASHINGTON, Aug 3 2004 (IPS) - The American Civil Liberties Union has withdrawn from a federal charity drive that would have required it to not employ people whose names appeared on government terrorism watch lists.

In withdrawing from the agreement the ACLU, the pre-eminent advocacy group for civil liberties in the United States, will be losing 500,000 dollars it planned to receive this year via the CFC. The plan manages charitable contributions to over 2,000 non-profit groups from federal employees and military personnel but requires those organisations to check their employees against a terrorist watch list.

By initially adhering to the plan, the ACLU, which has led the fight against the Patriot Act and other measures in the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” that it says threaten individual rights, was accused by some individuals of hypocrisy.

But in a Jul. 31 letter to CFC Director Mara Patermaster, ACLU Director Anthony Romero charged, “the Patriot Act and the government’s ‘war on terror’ are threatening the ability of America’s non-profit charities to do their essential work.”

Romero originally signed a CFC certification agreeing to not knowingly employ anyone named on the government watch lists, after his attorneys advised him he could do so in good faith because the agreement prohibited only knowing employment of those listed.

Using that interpretation, Romero says he intended to avoid comparing the ACLU’s employee roster and job applications with the list.

But Patermaster, in a Jul. 31 article in the ‘New York Times’, said ignoring the information on the lists was unacceptable and not in compliance with the agreement Romero signed in January.

“We expect that the charities will take affirmative action to make sure they are not supporting terrorist activities,” she said. “That would specifically include inspecting the lists. To just sign a certification without corroboration would be a false certification,” she added.

The ACLU’s board of directors debated the agreement at a Jul. 9 meeting in San Francisco in which a motion to rescind the promise to the CFC was defeated by a voice vote.

During the contentious meeting, reported the Times, one board member stormed out in disgust with the decision to not withdraw the ACLU from Romero’s commitment to comply with terrorist watch lists.

But other sources say the board meeting’s debate was no more spirited than usual. “This is making a mountain out of not quite a molehill,” said a senior member of the ACLU executive committee in an interview with IPS.

The issue of the CFC funding agreement was not the major focus of the meeting and was blown out of proportion by the newspaper account, added the IPS source.

The ACLU is supported by annual dues and contributions from its members, plus grants from private foundations and individuals. It does not receive government funding. Its 2002 budget (the most recent available) was 102 million dollars, according to the Times.

In recent months the ACLU has actively opposed the terrorist watch lists and the Transportation Safety Authority’s (TSA) “no-fly” list, which informs airlines to conduct additional searches or refuse boarding to individuals deemed threats to aviation.

The ACLU contended the no-fly list violated constitutional rights to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and to due process of law, and filed a lawsuit Apr. 6 on behalf of a number of people, including a master sergeant in the Air Force, two ACLU employees and a Presbyterian minister, who all found themselves, wrongly, placed on the list.

After the Jul. 31 withdrawal from the CFC, an ACLU press release condemned the campaign’s insistence on using the terrorist watch list as a form of “government ‘blacklist’ policy.”

In his Jul. 31 letter to Patermaster, Romero argued, “we have found in ACLU litigation regarding other watch lists that these lists are notoriously riddled with errors and do not provide individuals with a means to correct false information.”

“If a name matches up against the CFC lists, employers would be required to violate the privacy rights of employees and ask inappropriate questions that trample employees’ associational rights,” he added.

Raising the possibility of a lawsuit, Romero wrote, “we will determine the best course for challenging the CFC restrictions in court. And, in this climate of fear and intimidation, we act not only on our behalf, but on behalf of our nation’s non-profits, to defend ourselves against (Attorney General) John Ashcroft and a government that tramples the constitution in the name of national security.”

But Patermaster countered, in the Times article, that the ACLU’s unwillingness to consult the terrorism lists in their hiring after signing the CFC agreement could be grounds for permanent exclusion from the programme.

The ACLU has strongly opposed efforts to “black list” individuals based on their associations with groups that are out of favour with the government ever since the 1940 decision to drop founding member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from its board because she was a member of the Communist Party.