-Caveat Lector- "I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands, one Nation under God,indivisible,with liberty and justice for all."
visit my web site at http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon My ICQ# is 79071904 for a precise list of the powers of the Federal Government linkto: http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon/Enumerated.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 18:53:11 PDT From: carl william spitzer iv <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [JBirch] WS>>SPLC's "Extremist" Cash Cow by William Norman Grigg= In July 1988, Morris Dees of the Montgomery, Alabama- based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was in search of a new foil for his fund-raising efforts. SPLC's Klanwatch auxiliary had been a potent fund-raising tool, and the SPLC's high-profile campaign against the Ku Klux Klan had earned the group tremendous notoriety. However, Dees la- mented to an associate that "the Klan thing is winding down" and that the SPLC might be left without a raison d'jtre. "Who knows what the Southern Poverty Law Center will be doing a year from now?" Dees mused to a reporter. The militia movement coalesced just in time to rescue the SPLC's financial prospects. Nobody has profited more from the contrived hysteria over the militia movement than Dees, a millionaire direct- mail maven who co-founded the SPLC in 1971. With a donor list adapted from the 1972 George McGovern presidential bid (which Dees served as chief fund-raiser), the SPLC quickly amassed a formidable operating budget. The purpose of the SPLC, according to Dees, was to take on "precedent-setting cases, the models for new directions in the law." Twenty- five years later, Dees has become the "expert" on "right- wing extremism" most frequently quoted in the media and consulted by law enforcement agencies. The jacket of Dees' new book Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, is decorated with effusive endorsements from the likes of Jimmy Carter, Leon Uris, and the Anti-Defama- tion League's Abraham Foxman. The February 1996 edition of the Klanwatch Intelligence Report, which assails the "Patri- ot Underground" as America's leading domestic terrorist threat, was distributed to over 6,500 law enforcement agen- cies across the nation. False Patriots: The Threat of Anti- Government Extremists, a 64-page "special report" from the SPLC published in April, is presently making the rounds of law enforcement agencies and media sources. "When 169 people were killed in the Oklahoma City explosion, it became clear that there was something more to the Patriot movement than their weekend war games," declares SPLC Militia Task Force Director Joe Roy in the overview to False Patriots. "It is critical that media, law enforcement and other public servants have a clear understanding of the danger these Patriots represent." Selling the "Cause"=== Like nearly all professional critics of the "far right," Dees has displayed few compunctions about consorting with terrorists and criminals who inhabit the far left. In 1975, Dees was a member of the defense team in the murder trial of Joan Little, a black convict who was accused of killing a prison guard with an ice pick. During the trial Dees was removed from the defense team and slapped with a felony charge of suborning perjury from a witness; the charge was later dropped without explanation. As reporter Mark Pinsky recorded in the March/April 1976 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Dees' allies in the Little case included the most unsavory elements of the hard left: [T]he great untold (or unreported) story of the Joan Little trial ... was the role of the Commun- ist Party, through its National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, in controlling the entire (and considerable) political movement surrounding the case. Angela Davis, a leading figure in both national organizations, became the most frequently quoted movement figure and con- stant companion of Joan Little.... Party members were visible and influential on the defense com- mittee, and the party frequently set up rallies of support around the country. This is not to suggest that Dees is a doctrinaire Marxist; rather, he is something of a leftist entrepreneur. Millard Fuller, an attorney and business partner of Dees in the 1960s, recalls: "Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not particular about how we did it. We just wanted to be independently rich." A 1988 profile in the leftist Progressive magazine quoted Dees as saying, "We just run our business like a business. Whether you're selling cakes or causes, it's the same...." Since the SPLC's founding in 1971, Dees has sold the "cause" of "racial justice," a campaign for which he had previously displayed little conviction. As a student in 1958, Dees worked on the gubernatorial campaign of George Wallace; at the time, he later recalled, "I had a tradition- al white Southerner's feeling for segregation." Although Dees' preferred self- portrait is that of a lifetime cham- pion of racial toleration, he had little to say when black activists were beaten by a mob in Birmingham in 1961. According to Fuller, Dees believed that "it would be bad business if rising young lawyers and businessmen spoke out" against mob violence. Dees and Fuller did later become involved in the affair -- as legal counsel for a member of the mob. Recalled Fuller, "Our fee was paid by the Klan and the White Citizens' Council." About two decades later, Dees created the SPLC's "Klanwatch" auxiliary to conduct a legal struggle against the KKK. Deborah Ellis, a former SPLC attorney who believes that the "Klan is no longer one of the South's biggest problems," states that "I felt that Morris was on a Klan kick because it was such an easy target -- easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on." According to a 1987 financial report, the SPLC had built up an endowment of almost $23 million, despite the habitual pleas of financial desperation included in the organization's direct mail solicitations. By 1994, the SPLC's endowment had swollen to $52 million, and it figured prominently in an eight-part investigative report published that year by the Montgomery Advertiser. By that time, the SPLC's fund-raising practices had provoked the disapproval of watchdog groups that monitor charities: In 1993, the American Institute of Philanthropy assigned the SPLC a "D" grade on a scale of A to F. The Advertiser also reported the complaints of 12 black former employees of the SPLC about the "paternalistic" attitudes they dealt with on the part of the organization's leadership. Gloria Browne, a black former SPLC attorney, suggested that the group was less interested in addressing social problems than in finding a profitable niche. Despite the group's efforts, according to Browne, "the market is still wide open for [their] product, which is guilt." "Total Warfare"= But the SPLC does more than merely peddle guilt. Randall Williams, who worked with the SPLC's Klanwatch project from 1981 to 1986, recalls: "We were sharing infor- mation with the FBI, the police, undercover agents. Instead of defending clients and victims, we were more of a super snoop outfit, an arm of law enforcement." It is the role of self-appointed sentinel against "right-wing extremists" that has given the SPLC its prominence -- and has made the group a potent threat to constitutional liberties. In an interview with Soldier of Fortune magazine, Laird Wilcox, another frequently quoted "expert" on political extremist groups, expressed some pointed criticism of Dees and his organization. "What has happened to Dees and the SPLC ... is what often happens to fanatic, single-minded idealists," maintains Wilcox. "They tend to define them- selves in terms of their enemies, i.e. 'anti-Klan,' and their crusade develops a kind of 'overdrive' where the end easily justifies the means, just as it does for all ex- tremist groups. The SPLC tends to view their critics and the groups they hate as essentially subhuman ... and the campaign against them acquires the character of 'total warfare,' where any distortion, fabrication or sleazy legal tactic is justified in terms of the struggle." These tendencies are readily visible in the SPLC's campaign against the militia movement, according to Wilcox. "The SPLC knows that bona fide 'links' between the militias and 'hate groups' are few and far between, and they know that the [accused] perpetrators of the Oklahoma bombing have no ties whatsoever to any militia organization. But in fund-raising letters and media appearances they simply lie about it because it raises money and helps to cause immense mischief for the people they hate." Degrees of Extremism= The SPLC's False Patriots report divides the "patriot" movement into five categories: "Armchair Patriots," who discuss and debate "arcane political theories" on computer networks; "Lifestyle Patriots," a category which includes everyone from survivalists to home schoolers; "Professional Patriots," which includes journalists, alternative media activists, and conservative mail-order entrepreneurs; "Outlaw Patriots," such as tax protesters and self-described "sovereign citizens"; and, finally, "Underground Patriots," who organize secret resistance cells in anticipation of urban guerrilla warfare. The unstated but obvious assump- tion here is that law-abiding patriots -- home schoolers, for example -- differ from "Outlaw Patriots" or "Underground Patriots" only in the degree of their extremism. The measures recommended by the SPLC to counteract the supposed danger presented by the patriot movement include a federal ban on militias, the imposition of policies forbid- ding police and military personnel to participate in mili- tias and patriot groups, aggressive federal surveillance of patriot organizations, specialized training for government employees to help them "in identifying extremist threats," and the adoption of anti-patriot editorial policies by the media: "Journalists should be careful not to present Patriot views of the Constitution without balancing them with pre- vailing legal interpretations." In short, the SPLC would have the federal government, the media, and the major opin- ion-molding elites define the patriot movement as something akin to a criminal conspiracy. Dees is also seeking to suppress political activism of which he disapproves through the use of civil suits. In 1989, Dees and the SPLC filed suit against neo-Nazi agitator Tom Metzger, claiming that he was complicit in the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant by a skin head gang in Portland, Oregon. The jury found in favor of this claim and assessed $12.5 million in damages against Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance (WAR) organization. The troubling aspect of this case was that no effort was made to prove that Metzger had planned the crime or even had specific foreknowledge of it. Dees claimed that "the murder was a direct result of the training and direction that an agent for Metzger had given the Portland skinheads with Metzger's full approval." WAR is certifiably a subversive organization, and Metzger unapologetically seeks to incite racial hostility and violence. Although he may not have instigated the Portland murder, he did express approval of the heinous crime. For this reason, there was a certain rough justice in the Portland verdict. However, Dees is using a variation of the legal strategy from the Metzger case against other political enemies. On April 19, 1995, Dees learned of the Oklahoma City bombing while he was in Navarre Beach, Florida in pursuit of a lawsuit against abortion opponent John Burt. Dees main- tains that Burt was involved in a "conspiracy to stop abor- tions being performed" by murdered Pensacola abortionist David Gunn. The criminal trial of Michael Griffin, who was convicted of murdering Gunn, provided no evidence of a conspiracy between Burt and the assailant; nevertheless, Dees maintains that they collaborated to create a "climate" of violence, and that "the killing was a foreseeable conse- quence of the conspiracy." It is not difficult to envision the uses which Dees and the SPLC would make of this legal strategy should it prove successful in the John Burt case. Hypocrisy and Contradiction= Like most self-styled "progressives," Dees is defined by his hypocrisies and contradictions. In the 1994 congres- sional elections, he insists, "race was the underlying issue that accounted for the Republican victory" as "politicians, talk show hosts, and religious zealots ... fanned the flames of prejudice and fear." However, Dees does not per- ceive racial prejudice to be motivation for mob violence -- much of it abetted by radical black radio personalities and "rappers" -- directed against Korean-Americans during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Rather, he sees that murderous and destructive rampage as yet another indictment of "white racism": "When southeast Los Angeles rioted after four policemen were acquitted of beating Rodney King, the rage was black, but the fear was white." Dees allows that abuses of government power occur, but apparently they only victimize the left. He condemns what he calls "law enforcement's violent reaction to the Black Panthers of the 1960s" and declares that "we should never forget the FBI's excesses during the civil rights and Viet- nam protest eras." He also declares that "I have been a target of government abuse myself. Because I served as the national finance director for George McGovern's 1972 presi- dential campaign, the Nixon White House put me on its ene- mies' list and sent a team of IRS agents to pick over all my financial records." Nevertheless, he expresses no sympathy for those -- like the Branch Davidians and the Randy Weaver family -- who have had to endure much more than the stress of an IRS audit. "I am more concerned with the victims of militia terrorists than with FBI or ATF excesses," he smugly pro- nounces, neglecting to mention that not a single act of documentable militia terrorism has yet taken place. Recall- ing that the SPLC had been approached during the Waco siege to offer legal assistance to the Branch Davidians, Dees archly declares that had he done so he would have been "on the wrong side of history." Without a hint of irony, Dees describes the final assault on the Davidian church as an attempt "to rescue the children at Waco." Such is the compassionate wisdom of the media's favorite "authority" on "right-wing extremism." http://thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no12/vo12no12_splc.htm ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get A Free Psychic Reading! 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