National Lawyers Guild [NLG]

National Lawyers Guild [NLG]

Leonard Weinglass (right) -- with David Dellinger (left)
and Jerry Ruben defendants of the Chicago 7 trial 1969.

William Kunstler,Tom Hayden (defendant),
Leonard Weinglass

"Legal Bulwark of the Communist Party"

.....September, 1950, House Committee on Un-American Activities

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The National Lawyers Guild(NLG) was organized in 1936 by a caucus of Communist Party, U.S.A.(CPUSA) lawyers assisted by the International Labor Defense, an American agency of the Comintern(Communist International). The NLG remains an active affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers(IADL), an international Communist front which operated under the control of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The International Department took over the old Comintern that was disbanded by Stalin during World War II.


A study prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency at the direction of the House Intelligence Committee in 1978, reported that the IADL:

"has been one of the most useful Communist front organizations at the service of the Soviet Communist Party....In the 31 years of the IADL’s existence, it 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."

IADL president, Pierre Cot, an official of the World Peace Council(WPC), the principal Soviet international Communist front, was even awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953.

In September 1950, the House Committee on Un-American Activities issued a report, "The National Lawyers Guild: Legal Bulwark of the Communist Party", which stated:

"The real aim 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....’ "

With the extensive revival of the NLG in the late 1960s and recruitment of a broad section of New Leftists who looked not to Moscow, but to the surrogate regimes of Havana, Hanoi, or Angola for models of revolutionary change, the NLG has had an increasingly close relationship with the Cuban regime. The NLG’s International Committee formed numerous subcommittees that coordinate both legal action and public relations and propaganda in support of various Soviet and Cuban-backed revolutionary terrorist movements. For example, the NLG’s Middle East subcommittee supported the Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO) and issued a blatantly biased report against Israeli legal and security measures against jailed terrorists. The NLG’s Vietnam subcommittee pressed for U.S. economic aid and “reparations” to the Hanoi government and urged recognition and support of the Vietnamese puppet state set up in Cambodia after the invasion and conquest by the North Vietnamese Army.

In 1978, a group of independent Marxists within the NLG’s membership published a document criticizing the NLG leadership for conducting "Guild affairs as though we were a committed Marxist-Leninist entity." The NLG Democratic Caucus complained that the NLG International Committee identifies the organization "with the positions of the ‘socialist’ countries on every major international issue." Bright fellows, those Democrat Congressmen!......but then, embarrassed ones, too!

Through their dual memberships in the American Civil Liberties Union and their activities in other Communist front organizations such as the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee(NECLC), leading NLG activists, including those working to defend terrorist organizations such as the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional(FALN) of Puerto Rico and the Weather Underground Organization(WUO) have played the most prominent role in the myriad of lawsuits against the CIA, FBI and local intelligence organizations.

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