143 Madison Avenue, 4th Floor
New York, NY
10016
Phone :212-679-5100 URL: Website
Active affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which served as a Soviet front group during the Cold War
Seeks to weaken America's intelligence-gathering agencies
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG)states that it is “dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our [American] political and economic system.” Identifying "economic and social justice" as its ultimate concerns, the organization aims to “eliminate racism”; “safeguard and strengthen the rights of workers, women, farmers and minority groups”; and “maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them.” With more than 8,000 members, the NLG has chapters in every major U.S. city and in nearly every state; it also has tens of thousands of active supporters worldwide.
The NLG's earliest antecedent was an agency known as the MOPR (the Russian initials for "International Class War Prisoners Aid Society"), which was formed by the Communist International (Comintern) in 1922 as part of its effort to infiltrate American legal organizations. Soon thereafter, MOPR became known as International Red Aid (IRA). In 1925 an American section of IRA was established under the name International Labor Defense (ILD), which in 1936 helped to organize the NLG.[1]
The NLG was officially launched in 1937. As evidenced by its Comintern roots, there were certainly elements within the early Guild that were dedicated Communist revolutionaries. NLG founding member David Freedman, for instance, candidly advocated socialism as a desirable alternative to American capitalism. Communist Party USA attorneys were also among the NLG's founders. But these were by no means the only actors within the fledgling organization: future Supreme Court Justices, New Deal supporters, civil libertarians, and other liberals were also among its earliest members.
A watershed moment for the organization occurred in its third year, when its National Executive Board chose not to adopt an amendment to the NLG Constitution condemning dictatorship and supporting democracy -- an amendment its Communist organizers called "divisive." During the McCarthy era, Guild members represented the Hollywood Ten, the Rosenbergs, and thousands of victims of what the NLG termed “the anti-communist hysteria.”
In 1946 the NLG became affiliated with the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), which is described in James Tyson's 1981 book Target America as "the world-wide Communist front group for attorneys." In 1978 the CIA characterized IADL as "one of the most useful Communist front organizations at the service of the Soviet Communist Party, [an organization that] has so consistently demonstrated its support of Moscow's foreign policy objectives, and is so tied in with other front organizations and the Communist press, that it is difficult for it to pretend that its judgments are fair or relevant to basic legal tenets."
In a 1950 report titled "Report on the National Lawyers Guild: Legal Bulwark of the Communist Party," the House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) declared: "The real aims of the National Lawyers Guild, as demonstrated conclusively by its activities, … are not specified in its constitution or statement of avowed purpose. In order to attract non-Communists to serve as a cover for its actual purpose as an appendage to the Communist Party, the National Lawyers Guild poses benevolently as 'a professional organization which shall function as an effective social force in the service of the people.'" The report accused the Guild of attacking the FBI as “part of an overall Communist strategy aimed at weakening our nation’s defenses against the international Communist conspiracy.” The document also recommended that Guild members be barred from federal employment, and that the ABA consider whether it should permit its members to belong to the Guild in light of the latter’s "subversive" character.
Decimated by the HUAC report, and viewed by many non-members with deep distrust, the Guild survived the 1950s by limiting the scope of its projects and otherwise concentrating on issues related to the practice of law rather than to societal transformation.
As the 1960s began, the Guild focused heavily on fighting for civil rights for African Americans. (One of the NLG’s black members, John Conyers, was elected to Congress in 1964.) The Guild defended rioters and others involved in civil unrest as the 1960s progressed, and "helped" the U.S. war effort in Vietnam by encouraging young men to become draft evaders and then defending them. NLG lawyers were active in defending those arrested during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots and members of the Black Panther Party.
Guild President Victor Rabinowitz (1967-1970) -- a Communist who represented Fidel Castro’s Cuban dictatorship -- openly advocated a Marxist future. Rabinowitz was also a member of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He and his law firm (Rabinowitz, Boudin, and Standard) represented such clients as the Soviet spies Alger Hiss and Judith Coplon, and the American military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who infamously leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971.
Repudiating the idea that incremental reforms were sufficient for committed leftists, the NLG’s 1967 Statement of Policy and Program argued that "basic structural changes in society" were needed.
During this same period, prominent Guild member Arthur Kinoy (co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights) argued that the proper role of the radical lawyer was to facilitate the coming anti-capitalist revolution by weakening the law’s ability to function effectively against law-breaking radicals. Guild President Paul Harris quoted Lenin in arguing that a successful revolution required a "legal struggle" that coincided alongside illegal, militant revolutionary activity. And Doris Brin Walker, who served as NLG President from 1970-1971 (and who would later remark that she was “so proud to be a member of the Communist Party”), eagerly anticipated a "Second American Revolution."
Also among the NLG's notable members during the 1960s and 70s, were the following individuals[2]:
David Rudovsky: This former NLG Vice President was also a member of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He was active in several lawsuits filed against the FBI, CIA, and Selective Service. Moreover, he was a steering-committee member of the National Conference on Government Spying, which led to the formation of the Campaign to Stop Government Spying.
Jonathan Lubell: This attorney was identified as a Communist during his days at Harvard Law School. He later worked with Philip Agee, the onetime CIA operations officer who went on to make a second career out of “exposing” CIA undercover operatives and operations in the 1970s and 1980s. Lubell became the Washington representative of Counterwatch, publisher of the Covert Action Information Bulletin, which until 1982 included a "Naming Names" column that tracked CIA officers who were under diplomatic cover.
Throughout the Cold War, the NLG embraced pro-Soviet agendas while systematically opposing the foreign policies of the United States. It promoted Marxist "liberation" movements in the 1970s, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (which the Guild recognized as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people"); the Viet Cong; the African National Congress; pro-Soviet Angolan and Mozambican factions; the Puerto Rican FALN; and the Philippine New People’s Army (the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines). The Guild also launched an effort to end the U.S. embargo on communist Cuba, a longtime friend of the organization.
In the 1980s the NLG supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the FMLN in El Salvador. It embraced the church-based Sanctuary movement and "began working systematically on immigration issues,” spurred by what it called “the need to represent Central American refugees and asylum activists fleeing U.S.-sponsored ‘terror.’” The Guild also supported the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the NLG "mobilized opposition" to Gulf War I. It similarly opposed the second war in Iraq as an “illegal preemptive” invasion of a sovereign state, exhorting Americans to engage in acts of “civil disobedience” to register their outrage. Said the Guild: “U.S. government officials forfeit legitimacy and the power to enforce laws against non-violent trespass and ‘disorder’ when they pursue policies that result in war crimes.”
In 1999, NLG member Chip Berlet, who is also an activist with Morris Dees’s Southern Poverty Law Center, described the Guild's saturation with Communist and far-left ideologies: "The cacophony at some [Guild] meetings ... [arises from] debates featuring cadres from Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, and Maoist groups, along with Marxists, anarchists, libertarians, and progressive independents -- interacting with a preponderance of reluctant Democrats -- all intertwined with multiple alternate identities as lawyers, legal workers, labor organizers, tribal sovereignty activists, civil liberties and civil rights advocates, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and people of color."
In 2003 the NLG initiated its Korean Peace Project (KPP), which dispatched a delegation to develop “personal and professional relationships” with leaders in North Korea, to “replace demonizing with dialogue,” and to determine the “real situation,” politically and economically, of life in that country. In a report summarizing their observations in North Korea, the KPP delegates noted that “this was not the Orwellian society George Bush and much of the media is [sic] trying to portray.” “The contrast,” added the report, “between North Korea and its lack of policeman, and North America in which armed police in bulletproof vests are commonplace, was more than striking -- it was startling. If the presence or absence of armed policemen is a criterion for a free society then it speaks volumes about the nature of the two societies.” The report praised North Korea’s free health care and education systems, and the fact that capital punishment was nonexistent in its criminal-justice system. It noted that women are not “objectified in the same ways they sometimes are in the West,” and observed that “[t]he absence of other [political] parties is not considered a failing, as the entire society is socialist.” Chastising the U.S. “for its failure to deal fairly and in good faith” with North Korea, the report stated that “the U.S. government cannot advocate the rule of law and democracy, when it fails to model it itself.” The report also recorded a North Korean general’s “astute” comment that his country does not “oppose the American people,” but only America’s “hostile policy and its efforts to exercise control over the whole world and inflict calamity on its people.” “Unresolved pain still exists about the Korean war where millions of Koreans were killed,” says the Korean Peace Project. “Nearly the entire North, including cities, was leveled to the ground by U.S. bombers.”
The Korean Peace Project is in keeping with the NLG’s propensity to blame the United States for any international conflicts that arise. Four hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for instance, John Wheat Gibson (the Guild’s Texas-Oklahoma Region Co-Vice President) claimed that the U.S. and Israel were most likely responsible for the atrocities of that day.
In July 2006, the NLG’s Middle East Subcommittee issued a condemnation of “Israel’s crimes against humanity and brutal aggression against Palestine and Lebanon.” This subcommittee has formulated a "Resolution to Divest, in Practice and Principle, from Israel"; a "Resolution to Stop and Dismantle the Wall" (a reference to the anti-terrorism barrier constructed in the West Bank); and a "Resolution Affirming the Individual and Collective Palestinian Right of Return." In March 2006 the NLG urged “support for the boycott of Israeli goods.”
Running anti-military-recruitment campaigns in U.S. schools, the NLG’s Military Law Task Force complains that “an inordinate percent of [America’s] wealth is directed away from the citizenry and its social needs, and into a military/industrial clique that saps the wealth of the nation.”
The NLG’s National Immigration Projectseeks “to recognize the contributions of immigrants in this country, to promote fair immigration practices, and to expand the civil and human rights of all immigrants, regardless of their status in the United States.” In short, it advocates amnesty for all illegals currently residing in the U.S., and unchecked immigration across open borders henceforth. The Guild further rejects “all deportations and manipulations of the border carried out in the interests of capitalism,” encouraging local NLG chapters to “develop training programs and legal clinics to support mass defense efforts against deportations.” According to the Guild, government raids against “undocumented working people” constitute “an effort to terrorize and silence immigrant communities."
In recent decades, the NLG has stood at the forefront of efforts to weaken America's intelligence-gathering agencies. By effectively pushing such legislation as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the NLG helped limit U.S. law-enforcement and counter-intelligence capabilities. Post-9/11, the NLG launched a national campaign to repeal the Patriot Act -- arguing that the Act's provisions trample on the civil liberties of Americans. The NLG similarly opposes the Domestic Security Enhancement Act and the use of military tribunals for captured combatants in the War on Terror.
In April 2004, the NLG announced that it had joined "a broad coalition of groups" challenging "the executive branch’s claim to un-checked wartime powers." Said the organization: "While the [Supreme Court] Justices will not rule on the constitutionality of the hundreds of detainees that are being held at Guantanamo Bay, the National Lawyers Guild believes the U.S. is unlawfully occupying the base because the treaty between the U.S. and Cuba limits its use to a 'coaling or naval station,' and not a prison or a concentration camp. The Lawyers Guild therefore calls for the immediate closure of the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and the release of the prisoners. If probable cause exists for charging these prisoners with criminal offenses, they should be charged and immediately be provided with access to legal counsel, human rights organizations and their families."
The San Francisco/Bay Area Chapter of the NLG co-signed a February 20, 2002 document, composed by C. Clark Kissinger’s radical group Refuse & Resist, condemning military tribunals and the detention of immigrants apprehended in connection with post-9/11 terrorism investigations. The Guild was also a signatory to a March 17, 2003 letter exhorting members of the U.S. Congress to oppose Patriot Act II, on grounds that it “fail[ed] to respect our time-honored liberties," and “would severely dilute, if not undermine, many basic constitutional rights.”
The NLG endorses the Community Resolution to Protect Civil Liberties campaign, a project of the California-based Coalition for Civil Liberties, which seeks to influence city councils to pass resolutions pledging noncompliance with the Patriot Act’s provisions. The Guild also endorsed the Civil Liberties Restoration Act of 2004, which was designed to roll back, in the name of protecting civil liberties, vital national-security policies that had been adopted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Following 9/11, the NLG released flyers, posters, and CDs entitled "Know Your Rights," which provided legal advice -- translated into several Middle Eastern languages -- for immigrants contacted by the U.S. government during its anti-terrorism initiatives. These materials advised immigrants to refuse to talk to investigators -- because “[t]he FBI is not just trying to find terrorists, but is gathering information on immigrants and activists who have done nothing wrong."
Consistent with the NLG’s view that nonwhite immigrants and minorities are routinely harmed by America’s allegedly rampant racism, sexism, and intolerance, the Guild’s United People of Color Caucus was created to counter these purported societal defects. The Caucus impugns “the capitalist United States” as a place “where economic prowess is dependent on the furthered and continued subjugation of people of color, women, the poor, queers and other oppressed people.”
Rejecting capitalism as a viable economic system, the NLG was a signatory to a May 30, 2000 document denouncing globalization, big business in general, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in particular. A co-signer was Medea Benjamin -- the leader of Global Exchange.
In recent years, the NLG has defended a number of notorious individuals and organizations:
On February 17, 2005, the Guild called for a “national day of outrage” to protest the prosecution and conviction of NLG member Lynne Stewart, the self-proclaimed "radical attorney" who had illegally facilitated communication between her incarcerated client Omar Abdel Rahman and his Egypt-based terrorist organization, the Islamic Group. The Guild ascribed Stewart's conviction to a Bush administration effort "to deter lawyers from representing politically unpopular clients, particularly individuals charged with terrorism-related crimes."
The NLG supports Lori Berenson, a New Yorker who was arrested in 1995 [and was later convicted] in Peru for her active involvement with the terrorist group known as MRTA (or “Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement”).
On June 12, 2006, the NLG denounced an FBI crackdown on domestic terror groups like the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, complaining that prosecuting such organizations for their use of explosives and high-caliber weapons evidenced a “disturbing trend of targeting protesters engaged in dissent, and in imposing draconian sentences for expressing such dissent.”
