OpinionJournal has an editorial about the far-left organizations coaching and funding the 9/11 victims’ group Peaceful Tomorrows—in particular, the Tides Center: The Politics of 9/11.

One of Peaceful Tomorrows’ founders is David Potorti. Mr. Potorti used to write for a left-leaning weekly in North Carolina, railing against faith-based initiatives, companies without unions and the “gaping inequities” in America. Within three months of losing a brother on September 11, he was protesting the war on terror in a peace march sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness, whose founder, Kathy Kelly, was recently sentenced to three months in prison for breaking onto an army installation. That’s where Mr. Potorti fell in with folks such as Kelly Campbell, a 9/11 family member and “environmental campaign coordinator.” Out of this emerged Peaceful Tomorrows.

The group was immediately welcomed into the Democratic network of money and support. Peaceful Tomorrows is a “project” of the leftist Tides Center. The Center provides back-office services to ideologically acceptable “charitable” organizations for a fee. The Center receives generous financial assistance from liberal foundations, including various Heinz family endowments. The chairman of at least one of those endowments is Teresa Heinz, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Peaceful Tomorrows has also received grant money from the closely related Tides Foundation. The Foundation pushes the principle that money is fungible for left-wing activist groups. Big donors (including the Heinz endowments) give money to Tides, with private instructions as to which groups it should then be distributed; thus the original donors don’t have to publicly admit to the activities they fund. According to a Tides Foundation spokesperson, the money Peaceful Tomorrows received did not come from Heinz. But when we asked Mr. Potorti where the money did come from, he said its funding was “confidential.”

Peaceful Tomorrows isn’t so stalwart about other rules. The Tides Center is a 501(c)3, a tax-exempt non-profit, and therefore correctly explains on its Web site that its projects “may not engage in direct support or opposition of a candidate for political office.” We can only assume the Tides Center has been too busy counting its Heinz money to sever ties with Peaceful Tomorrows after its Bush opposition.