ACLU & Terrorists

From IBD:

Posted 3/9/2006

National Security: The American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal court to block the U.S. government from wiretapping suspected terrorists. But then, aiding America's enemies is nothing new for the ACLU.

In District Court in Detroit on Thursday, the ACLU ludicrously claimed NSA surveillance must be stopped because it's forcing journalists to fly "overseas to speak with their sources." Sorry, but we haven't heard Bob Schieffer complaining he has to fly to London to phone Hillary Clinton.

In multiple suits in different states, the ACLU is going after both the National Security Agency and the Pentagon. But the issue may be personal as well as ideological to the radical outfit.

It turns out that one of the most notorious members of a domestic terrorist organization of 35 years ago actually worked as an ACLU lawyer: Bernardine Dohrn of the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground).
According to her official biography posted by Northwestern University School of Law, where she serves as clinical associate professor of law, Dohrn has done work for the ACLU's Roger Baldwin Foundation. (Baldwin is the ACLU founder who once infamously said, "I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.")

After the Charles Manson murders in 1969, Dohrn told an audience of the radical Students for a Democratic Society: "Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach. Wild!"

In the early 1970s, the Weathermen took credit for a dozen bombings. Their targets included the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and New York City police headquarters. Dohrn was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List in 1970, and J. Edgar Hoover called her "the most dangerous woman in America."

Dohrn and her husband — fellow Weathermen member Bill Ayers, now professor of education at the University of Illinois — were indicted in federal court for conspiring to bomb police stations and government buildings. The charges were dropped over illegal surveillance.

Dohrn was eventually jailed for seven months for refusing to testify in the Brinks robbery case of a fellow group member.

Like the ACLU, the American Bar Association questions the constitutionality of President Bush's "spying" program. Also like the ACLU, the ABA is tight with Dohrn. She was the founding chairwoman of the ABA's Children's Legal Rights Committee and was appointed to an ABA advisory committee on immigration.
So much for the nation's most prominent lawyers organization's regard for lawfulness.

Has Dohrn ever expressed remorse? Quite the contrary: In an article last year for the New York-based socialist publication Monthly Review, she called the U.S. "the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth."
Dohrn is more proof that the ACLU is not some great guardian of the rights of Americans. It has spent its history opposing American values and traditions. It is an enemy undermining our country, and it's never been more dangerous than now, during wartime.