This piece by Shawn Macomber appeared at FrontPage on Thursday, detailing the ACLU’s determination to avoid any appearance of concern for the security of Americans.
The ACLU has hit a new low.
The group’s latest batch of press releases insists that the organization will never check their new hires against terrorism watch lists.
The problem for the ACLU is that they actually already signed an agreement to use the watch lists in order to obtain nearly $500,000 from the Combined Federal Campaign, as required by the USA PATRIOT Act. The CFC is an agency which dispenses charitable donations from federal and state employees to more than 2,000 non-profit groups, which totals some $250 million per year.
The ACLU, however, despite all its bluster about the Constitution, apparently has little use for contract law. They decided to simply disregard the list. And they probably would have gotten away with it if they could have kept their egos in check. That, of course, proved quite impossible and soon ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero was announcing to the world on NPR that while he’d printed out the watch lists, he’d “never consulted them.” Furthermore, he had no intention of doing so.
When CFC Director Mara Patermaster pointed out in the New York Times that the ACLU was willfully violating government policy, the ACLU actually voted to heed the agreement and collect their cash. Then Romero, seemingly unable to repress any rash impulse whatsoever, pulled out of the agreement entirely, and began screaming the ACLU’s favorite word from the rooftops, one so integral to the martyr myth the group was built on–“blacklist.”
“It is increasingly clear that 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 wrote in a letter to Patermaster. “By requiring non-profit charities to check their employees against a ‘blacklist’ in order to receive donations from the CFC, you are furthering a climate of fear and intimidation that undermines the health and well-being of this nation.”
How will the health and well-being of this nation be affected by a terrorist employee of the ACLU setting off a bomb in New York City?