No, the quotes are cooked. Totally taken out of context and slyly arranged to change the fact that I was criticizing ADL. I threatened to sue the Nation unless they issued a retraction. I argued back and forth with Victor Navasky for a long time. We agreed to have an attorney for the Nation look at the original quotes and Cockburn's use. The compromise was that I got to write a letter to the editor and the Nation agreed to force Cockburn to apologize in print. Then, in the same column with the apology (such as it was, hard to tell it was an apology or retraction), he attacked me again in a vicious manner, although this time without cooking the quotes. The attack on Friedman was part of some obscure personal feud that I got caught up in. Cockburn completely misrepresents the Friedman article in his column, as well.
Some years later Cockburn brought the matter back up in a column, suggesting I was soft on the issue of government surveillance. I sent Katrina Vanden Heuvel a pound of articles I had written or edited on government intelligence abuse. Cockburn then did a 180 and said in a column that he apparently had overlooked my work in the area of surveillance abuse.
Sigh...
For the record, I am a co-founder of Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report, the leading legal serial for helping attorneys sue government agencies over issues of police abuse and illegal surveillance.
Check out some of my articles and other work on the subject at:
http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/Security_for_Activists.htm
-Chip Berlet
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of C. G. Estabrook
> Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 10:55 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: RE: ADL spied on behalf of South Africa gov't in
> aparthaid era
>
>
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Chip Berlet wrote:
> > This was huge...9 years ago.
>
>
> [Thanks for the bibliography -- on a matter in which you
> apparently had
> more than a passing interest. Are the quotations from you in the
> following column (Alex Cockburn, The Nation 19930531) accurate? --CGE]
>
>
> ...There have been fears that political pressure might
> squelch the case
> against the Anti-Defamation League spies being built by the
> San Francisco
> District Attorney, Arlo Smith. But the "San Francisco
> Examiner" for May 11
> carried a story by Dennis Opatrny and Scott Winokur reporting that top
> officials of the ADL are "the ultimate targets of the San Francisco
> district attorney's domestic spying investigation." Such
> officials include
> the ADL's New York-based director of research, Irwin Suall.
> Meanwhile, the
> ADL's strategy is to link critics of its spy operation with
> neo-Nazis and
> with the World Trade Center bombers.
>
> I note here a story on the scandal in "The Village Voice" for
> May 11 by
> Robert Friedman. Since Friedman once wrote "The Nation"
> complaining I had
> credited another reporter for facts he had unearthed, I must
> say that I
> have a serious problem with the way he avoids giving credit
> to anyone but
> himself.
>
> Last July, in "Washington Report on Middle East Affairs," Gregory
> Slobodkin broke the story of AIPAC's smear operation in a story titled
> "The Secret Section in Israel's US Lobby That Stifles
> American Debate." On
> August 4, Friedman did a "Voice" story, "The Israel Lobby's
> Blacklist."
> Nowhere in Friedman's story was it stated that Slobodkin had already
> published an account of his experiences at AIPAC.
>
> In his May 11, 1993, piece on the ADL, Friedman was still
> boasting that
> AIPAC's "spy operation was disclosed last summer in the
> `Voice,'" which it
> wasn't. And he never thanks his sources or acknowledges the efforts of
> people long laboring on the story, such as journalists in San
> Francisco or
> ABC-TV's James Bamford, who discovered the Benjamin Epstein
> letter from
> which Friedman quotes without tipping his hat to the
> journalist who got
> the document first.
>
> In fact, Friedman relies uncritically on the statements of ADL spy Roy
> Bullock to the FBI and to San Francisco police, as though
> they were proven
> facts. And in the end he lets off the ADL with a light
> stroke, courtesy of
> researcher Chip Berlet, who says the ADL "is a group whose leaders, at
> least, consistently defend the actions of Israel against
> critics, which
> ... is entirely appropriate" and "is a group that maintains an
> information-sharing arrangement with law enforcement. Again, there is
> nothing wrong for a group to do that." Berlet argues that it was some
> malign synergy between such ADL functions that led to
> trouble. In effect,
> he OK's the ADL's venomous smearing of critics as
> anti-Semites and then
> makes the amazing statement that there's nothing wrong with illegal
> acquisition and dissemination of privileged government
> information about
> individuals. This is the basis of the class-action suit
> against the ADL in
> California.
>
> [end]
>
>