More than 30 longtime supporters of the American Civil Liberties Union are calling for the ouster of the organization’s leadership, saying it has failed to adhere to the principles it demands of others and thus jeopardized the organization’s effectiveness. The new group is made up of donors, former board and staff members, and the lawyer who won what was perhaps the A.C.L.U.’s most famous legal battle, its defense of the right of Nazis to march through a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago. “We come together now, reluctantly but resolutely, not to injure the A.C.L.U. but to restore its integrity and its consistency of principle,’’ the group said in a mission statement to be posted on its Web site, www.savetheaclu.org, which is to go live on Tuesday. The statement does not name individual officials that the group wants to see removed, but in the past, criticism has been focused on Anthony D. Romero, the executive director, and Nadine Strossen, the board president, as well as members of the executive committee. The Web site, which was first reported in The New York Sun in June, initially will feature letters from members and donors who have joined the effort, lists of articles about the A.C.L.U. and ways for readers to join the effort. “It’s a home for A.C.L.U. loyalists who have been shut out of the organization,” said Ira Glasser, who was executive director of the organization from 1978 to 2001 and has signed the statement. Mr. Glasser emphasized that the group, conceived by Alan Kahn, a retired Wall Street executive and longtime A.C.L.U. member, was an informal one. “We’re not starting a new organization,” he said. “We’re a protest group, trying to get the board to exercise its fiduciary and governing responsibility in a way that it has not. We’re loyal to the existing organization and above all to the principles it is intended to advance.” Emily Whitfield, an A.C.L.U. spokeswoman, defended the organization, saying it continued to fight aggressively for the principles of free speech. “Our programs, both legal and legislative, have never been stronger,” Ms. Whitfield said, “and then there’s the phenomenal growth of the A.C.L.U., where we’ve nearly doubled staff, our revenues are higher, membership and donations are higher, and that, to us, tell us where we are right now, in terms of our organization. We’re proud of it.” She added, “We’re proud to be the leading organization fighting for freedom of speech on the Internet,” noting that the A.C.L.U. would go to court next month to argue that federal efforts to limit access to certain kinds of content on the Web to protect children violated the free speech protection in the Constitution. And she pointed out that other independent Web sites already reported and commented on the A.C.L.U., including acluprocon.org and stoptheaclu.com, among others.

We reject the claim that the ACLU is injured not by its unprincipled, anti-libertarian actions, but by those who disclosed or criticized them. Repeated breaches of principle by the ACLU leadership have been fundamental and cannot simply be attributed to isolated lapses in judgment: they reflect basic disrespect for the values that the ACLU was created to defend. This has gone on for so long, and has become so pervasive, that we now believe that only a change in leadership will preserve the ACLU and insure its future as the nation’s leading civil liberties group.