Who's Watching the ACLU Watchdogs?

The ACLU has an ongoing dispute within its ranks for a few years. I learned about it in February, 2007. Others told me that they were unaware of it as well, including one member of the ACLU.
Here is a link to a story from The Nation February 5, 2007, followed by a link to a story in New York Magazine dated February 19, 2007.


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070205/sherman
ACLU v. ACLU
The Nation
by SCOTT SHERMAN
February 5, 2007

Last September a group of civil libertarians launched a website, savetheaclu.org, on which they declared: "We come together now, reluctantly but resolutely, not to injure the ACLU but to restore its integrity." Only a "change in leadership," they insisted, "will preserve the ACLU." That website, and those words, marked a new phase in a lengthy campaign to unseat Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director. The website contained a surprise: a pithy and combative declaration from Romero's retired predecessor, Ira Glasser, who recruited Romero for the top job six years earlier.

Tension at the upper echelons of the ACLU has been evident for some time. On April 22 of last year, the ACLU national board converged on the Princeton Club in Manhattan for its quarterly meeting. A few weeks earlier, in an interview with the conservative New York Sun, board member Wendy Kaminer had criticized a statement by the ACLU's Washington legislative director. What Kaminer did was hardly unusual: For more than two years she has been an indefatigable critic of the ACLU leadership.

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Anthony Romero

http://www.nymag.com/news/features/27839/index.html

Freedom to Backstab
Anthony Romero, head of the ACLU, America’s most important free-speech organization, has been accused of lying, among other transgressions—by his own mentor. Who said liberties had to be civil?
New York Magazine
February 19, 2007
By David France

Anthony Romero is weary of scrutiny. In dozens of lawsuits, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union inveighs against the Bush administration for peering into Americans’ letters, e-mails, and phone calls without court orders. Last month, he denounced the Pentagon for monitoring 186 antiwar protests and keeping files on pacifist groups, from Veterans for Peace to the Catholic Worker Movement. If Romero has learned one thing after five years at the ACLU’s helm, it is the cleansing power of shining a light into an institution’s darkest corners.