San Diego, CA (special) -- The decade-old Mount Soledad Cross controversy is heating up again with the Anti-Defamation League, and possibly soon the American Jewish Committee, deciding to file "friend of the court" briefs in support of atheists who challenge the constitutionality of last year's sale of one-half acre around the cross to the Mount Soledad Memorial Association.

The Anti-Defamation League said it definitely planned to file a brief urging U.S. District Court Gordon Thompson Jr. to give serious scrutiny to the process by which the Mount Soledad Memorial Association won the bidding. The American Jewish Committee, through spokesman Gary Rotto, said the group's national legal committee has scheduled a discussion whether to do the same.

In the decade-long controversy, Thompson first ruled that it was unconstitutional for the cross to be on public land. After that decision was affirmed in the appeals process, the city attempted to sell a small parcel of land around the cross to the Mount Soledad Memorial Association so that the cross could be left up. The court said such a transaction, guaranteed to preserve the cross, violated constitutional requirements for separation of church and state.

Subsequently, the city put a larger parcel of land around the cross up for public bid. When the bids were opened last year, the Mount Soledad Memorial Association was high bidder with $106,000, followed by bids for $100,000 by Horizon Christian Fellowship; National League for Separation of Church and State $65,000; and the Freedom from Religion Foundation $25,000.

St. Vincent de Paul meanwhile said it would be willing to pay $5,000 over the highest bidder -- but that bid was ruled to unacceptable by City Attorney Casey Gwinn.

James McElroy, the attorney for plaintiff Philip Paulson, told the news media the bidding process was rigged in such a way that it guaranteed the result of a cross remaining on the land. Gwinn denied this, adding that Paulson and fellow atheists were among the lower bidders.

Dan Gardenswartz, chair of the San Diego regional Anti-Defamation League's committee on civil rights, said the ADL decided to intervene because of "a concern for the integrity of the process. 

"It just so happened that the bidder who was awarded the transfer was the same entity that was transferred the property previously when there was no bidding process," he said. 

"The city basically retained absolute discretion as to who would be awarded the contract," he added. "They also very much narrowed the pool of qualified bidders in the first place. ...They narrowed the purpose for which the land had to be continued to be used."

Gardenswartz said ADL members voted to intervene, "not because they are adamant that the cross had to come down under any circumstances; the ADL wants to make sure that the process that the city went through was a process that at least this time was meant to cure the constitutional violation and not subvert the constitution.

"In light of the city's past behavior, which was clearly to try to do an end run around the primary ruling that you can't maintain this 40-foot Latin cross on public property, we want to make sure that this transfer was in fact a constitutional one."