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The Radical Left’s War on Gitmo and America

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  • The Radical Left’s War on Gitmo and America

    I suggest you read this at the source. because the article uses in-text links to back up its points

    Michael Ratner and CCR: Fighting Against the War on Terror

    On May 30, 2005 the NY Times reported on an increasingly successful effort by the Center for Constitutional Rights,(CCR) which it described only as "a group based in New York," to enlist lawyers to represent detainees being held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The story focused on CCR's success in recruiting prominent law firms to the effort including Clifford Chance, Dorsey&Whitney; Allen & Overy; Covington & Burling and Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering Hale & Dorr a firm that, oddly enough, also does business with companies involved in the U.S. defense, national security and government contracts sectors.

    Now those prisoners, who Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld calls 'the worst of the worst,' will be allowed access to U.S. legal representation, setting the stage for what will be a major propaganda nightmare for those in charge of protecting the U.S. from the totalitarian Islamist fanatics who seek to destroy it.

    Among those prisoners is Osama bin Laden's close personal aide and driver.

    On July 23, 2003, U.S. Major General Geoffrey Miller said that three-quarters of the roughly 660 prisoners that were at that time housed at Guantanamo had confessed to at least some involvement in terrorism. And it is known that some of the prisoners released from the original 660 initially held there have since been recaptured in combat against U.S. forces. Nevertheless, the violent Islamists who end up being incarcerated at Guantanamo are treated better than any combat prisoners have been in the history of warfare.

    The U.S. Defense Department insists that information elicited from prisoners at Guantanamo is vital to the success of the War on Terror. In spite of that position, the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has invested considerable resources in trying to end
    interrogations at Guantanamo in a de facto attempt to free all prisoners held there and shut down the camp.

    In order to fully understand CCR's publicly stated reasons for advocating for prisoners at Guantanamo, which center on the concept of "civil rights," and to understand its lesser known but much more important reasons for wanting interrogations there halted, it is necessary to briefly examine the history of the CCR and its leadership, the types of clients it advocates for and its political affiliations. And a thorough examination of CCR's current president, Michael Ratner, who is the driving force behind the Guantanamo shut-down effort, is absolutely vital to understanding the position that CCR takes today regarding the rights of prisoners captured in the War on Terror.

    Center for Constitutional Rights founded by Communists and anti-U.S. radicals

    The CCR was founded in 1966 by attorneys Morton Stavis, William Kunstler, Ben Smith and Arthur Kinoy--all members of either the Communist Party or the radical left. Before forming CCR, Kunstler and Kinoy drafted and circulated a detailed memo calling for the creation of a 'new Communist Party.' That never materialized. Instead, Kunstler and the other lawyers, some of whom were also members of the National Lawyers Guild, a communist front group,
    focused their energies on building the CCR and formulating and fulfilling its main mission of clearing legal roadblocks for leftist revolutionaries and enemies of the U.S. and capitalist economic system.

    In candidly describing his life's work of representing and advocating for violent radicals, CCR founding member William Kunstler once said, "I stay in this profession only because I want to be a double agent, to destroy the whole f*cking [U.S.] system." Throughout his life, Kunstler made clear that CCR's main mission was to keep violent leftist revolutionaries and other enemies of the U.S. out of jail and on the streets where they could toil away at destroying the institutions of American democracy.

    Beginning in the 1960s, the CCR worked closely with two other "civil liberties" groups with communist and far-left pedigrees; the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which, as stated earlier, shared membership with the CCR, and the ACLU.

    In 1971 the ACLU announced the "dissolution of the nation's vast surveillance network'' as its foremost priority. The successes of the ACLU, the NLG and CCR in the voluminous harassing lawsuits each filed against police intelligence units, the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies, destroying some and badly crippling all of them in the process, was largely responsible for seriously weakening America's domestic intelligence capabilities, the results of which contributed heavily to the U.S. government's inability to thwart the Islamist plot that led to the 9/11 attacks.

    CCR represents anti-U.S. clients and pushes anti-U.S. agenda

    A list of CCR's clients is striking in its homogeneity. Since its founding, CCR has legally represented, consistently and almost exclusively, Communists, violent leftist revolutionaries, far-left groups and individuals, cop-killers and sworn enemies of the United States.

    Obviously, there are many ethical lawyers and law firms that represent criminals and defend those with whom they may have deep moral and ideological disagreements with. And every lawyer's sworn duty is to put forth the best possible defense for his client. The exercise of that duty doesn't normally imply agreement with client activities, but in the case of CCR and its president, Michael Ratner, who has been with CCR almost since its inception, the line between client defense and advocacy is often difficult to define. "I don't usually take cases where I disagree with the politics of the people involved," said Ratner in a 2002 interview, indicating that his view, of who deserves justice and who does not, is tied directly to the ideological bent of the group or individual seeking it.

    CCR clients, past and present, include:

    * Leonard Peltier, convicted of murdering two FBI agents.
    * The Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation, (FALN) which
    was responsible for more than 50 bomb attacks on U.S. political and military targets between 1974 and 1983.
    * Victor Manuel Gerena, who was trained by the Puerto Rican terrorist group Macheteros (Machete Wielders) and is accused of robbing 7 million dollars from a Connecticut security company in 1983, taking two guards hostage in the process. He is currently on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
    * Red Army Faction terrorist Kurt Groenwold, who provided a safe house for Philip Agee, a CIA officer who, after defecting to Cuba, began publishing the Covert Action Information Bulletin which, in his words was "a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel."
    * Red Army Faction member Yu Kikumura, who was convicted of conspiring to bomb a U.S. Navy recruiting station on behalf of Libya. Kikumura was apprehended at a New Jersey Turnpike service area in possession of three home-made bombs.
    * Red Army Faction member Kristina Berster, apprehended carrying an Iranian
    passport while entering the U.S. illegally after nine months of terrorist training in Yemen
    * Red Army Faction/Baader Meinhof members who bombed U.S. Army and German police stations and provided logistical support for the PLO faction that murdered Israeli Olympic team members during the 1972 Olympics.
    * Black Panther "Minister of Justice" H. Rap Brown who murdered a Georgia Sheriff's Deputy and attempted to murder another law enforcement officer
    * Black Panther members and cop-killers Abdul Majid and Basheer Hameed
    * William Morales a convicted terrorist bomber and a member of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN, whose lawyer, Susan Tipograph, a member of the May 19 Communist Order, an offshoot of the old Weather Underground, helped him escape from prison. (Tipograph also represented another CCR favorite, Lynne Stewart, the "blind sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman's lead defense lawyer, after Stewart was charged with acting as a courier between the sheikh and terrorists under his control. CCR filed an amicus brief on Stewart's behalf and it continues to vigorously defend her in the court of public opinion.

    CCR has also represented members of the radical anti-U.S. United Freedom Front, which financed itself by robbing banks from Connecticut to Virginia. Its members, later known as the "Ohio Seven," were convicted of involvement in numerous bombings and the murder of a NJ state trooper. Members of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have been clients of the CCR, as have convicted spy DavidTruong; Wilfred Burchett, a KGB agent and journalist who took the side of North Korea and North Vietnam during their wars with the U.S.; and convicted spy Clayton Lonetree, a U.S. Marine who while stationed in Moscow in 1981, sold U.S. documents and blueprints to the Soviets. More recently CCR represented "dirty bomb" conspirator Jose Padilla.

    CCR lawyers have begun specializing in defending Muslim terrorists and terrorist suspects. Stanley Cohen, a CCR affiliated lawyer, has defended the "blind sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman; Mousa Abu Marzook, a Hamas leader; Mazin Assi, a Palestinian-American convicted of firebombing a Bronx synagogue; and Moataz Al-Hallak, a Texas imam who is suspected of having direct ties to al-Quaeda and the 9/11 hijackers. At a 1998 Islamic conference held by the American Muslim Alliance where he was the keynote speaker, Cohen stated that the "true terrorists are the state of Israel and its supporter, the United States, in perpetuating the victimization of the Palestinians in their own land." At that same conference, he referred to another Hamas leader as his "brother." It is interesting to note that Hillary Clinton sent a welcoming letter to the same conference, thanking the organizers for "efforts to encourage others to work to make their voices heard."

    Besides providing legal support for terrorists and enemies of the U.S., Michael Ratner and CCR endorse communist, fringe leftist and radical groups with anti-U.S. agendas. Ratner himself often signs petitions on behalf of such groups. A typical example of this involves the case of Dr. Jose Maria Sison, the head of the communist New Peoples Army (NPA) of the Philippines.

    Like most realized communist movements, the NPA eventually turned on itself and killed approximately 1000 of its members in a paranoid orgy of bloodletting. Sison, who headed the NPA at the time, is widely believed to have ordered the purge. Sison and NPA are on terrorist lists in both Europe and in the U.S., which has frozen NPA's assets. Michael Ratner, along with Lynne Stewart, Ramsey Clark, Leslie Cagan, C. Clark Kissinger, Michael Steven Smith, the NLG and others signed a petition demanding that Sison and the NPA both be removed from Europe's list of known terrorists. The group also voiced its opposition to any attempts that might be made to extradite Sison from the Netherlands, where he currently lives.

    A listing of all of Michael Ratner's and CCR's similar affiliations and endorsements would fill many pages but their affiliation with the "Free Mumia" movement typifies the types of groups, individuals and ideological positions that both consistently endorse.

    The "Free Mumia" movement agitates in support of the prison release of convicted cop-killer, anti-American radical and leftist icon Mumia Abu Jamal. A list of Jamal supporters includes not only CCR, but also its current executive director Ron Daniels, who has been honored by the Communist Party USA for his work; convicted terrorist Yu Kikumura, who is a member of the Millions for Mumia support committee; Pam Africa, the self-styled "Minister of Confrontation" for the violent radical group MOVE; Ramsey Clark, head of the radical International Action Center; C. Clark Kissinger, a communist and leader of the radical anti-U.S. group Refuse and Resist; the International Socialist Organization; Anarchist Black Cross; the Trotskyist League and the communist Workers World Party. Under Michael Ratner's leadership, CCR has fostered and maintained close ties to most of these groups and individuals.

    The CCR has historically taken one anti-U.S. and anti-law enforcement position after another. It argued that Americans who were involved in the Vietnam War should have been tried under the Nuremburg war crimes laws. It argued that the Vietnam War was criminal and unconstitutional. It argued against the U.S. military's long-standing use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for war games. It strenuously attacked U.S. anti-Communist foreign policy concerning Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador and the rest of Central and South America.

    More recently, the CCR, under the guidance of its current president, Michael Ratner, has been responsible for 9 of the 16 major lawsuits against the United States government's post-9/11 counter-terrorism policies, attacking U.S. policy regarding the detention of illegal aliens and attacking the establishment of Military Tribunals to try terrorists. CCR is currently fighting laws, including provisions of the Patriot Act, that make it a crime to provide material support to terrorists. Ironically, the Patriot Act of 2001 was a de facto effort to reinstitute some of the same crime fighting and intelligence gathering mechanisms that Ratner, CCR, NLG and the ACLU fought against and helped roll back in the 1960s and 70s.

    CCR has a long history of litigating for those who agitate against the U.S. and against laws and institutions that uphold law and order. It is also true that the U.S. government urrently takes a hard-line stance towards those who provide material support to terrorists and terrorist organizations.These facts might lead one to wonder if part of CCR's motivation for opposing key provisions of post 9/11 anti-terrorism laws stems from its own sense of self-preservation.

    With such a history, CCR's current focus on assisting enemy combatants is not surprising even though most of them, as stated earlier, were captured in battle against U.S. forces in Afghanistan and some of them have direct ties to the al-Qaeda organization that plotted and carried out the 9/11 attacks.

    It is equally unsurprising that this effort has been personally led by CCR's Michael Ratner, whose long history of involvement in leftist legal organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, and whose personally antagonistic stance towards U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies has made him a natural fit for the job of under-cutting U.S. ability to gather information from its Islamist enemies.

    Ratner praises Castro's Cuba and Che Guevara

    Michael Ratner is the son of the late real estate and building supply magnate Harry Ratner. As a young man, Michael Ratner wanted to study archaeology. But according to him, after seeing how his father managed to often "help the little guy," he decided to study law instead. Ratner says that watching his father feed ex-cons at the family dinner table, help resettle refugees in the U.S. after World War II and anonymously provide for people who had been burned out of their homes had a profound influence on his decision to become a lawyer as a way of helping "the little guy." But as both his client list and record of litigation while working for both the CCR and the NLG indicate, instead of fighting for the little guy, it seems that Michael Ratner has, more often than not, fought for the bad guy.

    Ratner's stance towards the current U.S. administration can most accurately be described as one of flippant disrespect and deep animosity. "In my view, these people are a bunch of thugs," he says in referring to the Bush Administration. "Ashcroft is the least sensitive person you could have to deal with constitutional rights; he thinks dissent is aiding terrorism...Warmongers remaking the map of the world. I wouldn't trust these guys to sell me a hamburger," he says.

    Though he views the democratically elected Bush team with disdain, Ratner applauds failed Communist revolutionary Che Guevara, who tortured and executed thousands during his attempt to turn Latin America into a worker's paradise and who was primarily responsible for setting up Communist Cuba's infamous prison system, modeled after the KGB designed Soviet system of gulags. Guevara, often portrayed as brave and heroic by the American and international Left, was so unnerved by his victims' screams that he ordered their mouths taped shut before they were tortured or killed on his orders. Still, Michael Ratner identifies deeply with Guevara, whom he considers a great hero and personal inspiration. In 1997 Ratner wrote a book with ex-Socialist Worker Party member Michael Steven Smith, on Guevara titled, "Che Guervara and the FBI: The U.S. Political Police Dossier on the Latin AmericanRevolutionary," in which he expressed his love of Guevara in this way: "...for many of us seeking to change our society, Cuba was a desirable model. And it was Che Guevara, more than any other figure, who embodied both that revolution and solidarity with peoples fighting to be free from U.S. hegemony. Many of us had on our walls the poster of Che with his famous quote: 'Let me say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.' It was a sentiment that combined what many of us in the 1960s were feeling: the need for revolutionary change with the need for compassion. Che has remained my hero ever since."[emphasis added]

    In the same book, Ratner's Che-worship reaches the level of rock-star adulation as he describes a hiking trip he took in 1976 tracing Guevara's path: "As we reached the top of a mountain, I could hear children singing. I could not believe it. What were they singing and why were they there? As I walked past I saw 40 or 50 neatly uniformed children standing in front of a school high in the mountains. These were the children of the revolution. Each was holding a handwritten placard and singing the words written thereon: 'Seremos como el Che.' 'We will be like Che.' Tears streamed down my cheeks, my energy was renewed and I completed the hike. To be like Che: To be selfless, to make a family of one's comrades, to give up comfort and material gain for the revolution, to risk and probably give one's life to free humanity."

    Michael Ratner has, for much of his life, maintained close ties with Cuba and the Castro regime and has vocally opposed the extradition of every American fugitive who fled to Cuba to escape U.S. justice. In a 1998 article published in Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ), the successor to CIA turncoat and KGB agent Philip Agee's Counter-Spy Bulletin (which Agee used to "out" CIA agents). Ratner strenuously opposed the extradition of Black Panther member JoAnne Chesimard, a.k.a. Assata Shakur who was convicted in 1977 of the execution-style murder of a New Jersey state trooper. Ratner reasoned that the U.S. had no business demanding the extradition of Shakur since it was itself a home to terrorists. "If there is a place terrorists can call home, it is the United States. Its history is hardly honorable," said Ratner, in explaining why the U.S. had no authority, moral or legal, to press for Shakur's return.

    Though Michael Ratner fights for convicted criminals who have escaped to Cuba and though he lends moral support to the Cuban regime and U.S. groups that support its agendas, he has never represented any of Castro's victims nor has he ever advocated for the release of the many political prisoners, including poets, artists, journalists and intellectuals who have paid the price of imprisonment for their dissent against the totalitarian Cuban regime. It is ironic, that although he supports the rights of violent Islamists who inhabit the U.S.-run Guantanamo detention camp, Ratner remains mute on the rights of the many non-violent dissidents in Guantanamo prisons run by Castro.

    Ratner took a vocal stance in the Elian Gonzales case, arguing that some of Gonzales' U.S.
    relatives were criminals, their Cuban-American supporters "right-wing Mafia."

    In a 2000 interview in Socialist Worker conducted by his close friend and colleague, Michael Steven Smith - the former Socialist Workers Party member, NLG member and current member of Ratner's Guantanamo liberation team, Ratner summed up some of the advantages of returning the Gonzales child to Cuba by saying: "And when you visit Cuba you realize that Cuban children are probably the best treated.. To say that Elian would be abused or would not get a decent life in Cuba is to turn the world on its head. If there is any place that I would be worried about Elian, it is in Miami with some of his cousins, who are criminals, and where there is a much bigger chance of children dropping through the safety net, which barely exists for children in the U.S., and going into a life of crime or drugs. In Cuba the chances of that happening are basically zero."

    Michael Ratner has children of his own. Though his cozy relationship with the Castrodictatorship would clearly make it easy for him to become a permanent resident of the Cuban paradise, Ratner has denied his children the advantages of growing up there, instead opting to raise them in its social, economic and ideological opposite: New York City.

    Ratner's involvement in controversial NY stadium proposal

    Perhaps important business considerations keep Michael Ratner rooted in New York instead
    of in his beloved Cuba since he is an investor in the $3 billion Forest City Ratner real estate
    corporation which is currently involved in a highly controversial project.

    His brother, Bruce, who heads Forest City Ratner, also owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team and is close to cementing a controversial deal with the State of New York and NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg to develop a sprawling stadium complex in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn and move the team there. Prior to his involvement in the stadium deal, Bruce Ratner was embroiled in the controversy that arose when he commissioned a politically correct statue that changed the races of two of the three NYFD members who took part in a famous flag-raising ceremony at Ground Zero after 9/11. Bruce Ratner is also a close confidant of Bill Clinton and has contributed heavily to his political campaigns.

    The Ratner's stadium project will cost New York, already $9 billion in debt, $200 million to $1 billion in infrastructure improvements necessary to accommodate the project. Many residents of Brooklyn have opposed the project, since 400 private homes and a 400-person homeless shelter would be demolished and hundreds of lower-income people would be forced out of the neighborhood.

    In 2003 numerous citizens groups sprang up to oppose the project, objecting to Forest City Ratner's attempts to invoke eminent domain laws--laws normally used to claim land for public projects-- to evict them from their properties.

    A February 2004 article published on the WBAI Radio website contains troubling stories concerning some of the residents facing eviction to make room for the Ratners' project:

    " 'People cant treat you like that. They just use you like an old newspaper,' says Vera Bryant, 70, an Antiguan immigrant who lives on Pacific Street with her two grandchildren. 'It's not
    right. This man Ratner comes in and says he's going to knock down people's houses, he's going to root them out of their homes.' "

    "We're going to have to move, and we probably don't have any legal claim to compensation," says Bill O'Brien, a rent-stabilized tenant on Dean Street. "There are people in my building who have been here for 30 years."

    "I'm on disability. I can't afford another rent," says another Dean Street resident, who pays $575 for a rent-stabilized studio apartment. "I get very upset that I don't count, that the people here don't count, that they say we're being unreasonable because we don't want to lose our homes.' "

    Recently, FCR bought out some of the property owners that occupy the future site of the Nets stadium. A citizens group, "No Land Grab," that opposes the stadium discovered that Michael Ratner was an investor in the project. Members of the group expressed great disappointment at the fact that while Ratner champions the rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, he ignores and tramples on theirs.

    Forest City Ratner Co. has imposed a gag order on all of the property owners who have been forced to sell their properties under threat of eminent domain seizure. Civil liberties attorney Norman Siegel, who represents some of the residents and businesses that would be displaced by FCR's stadium complex called the gag order "extremely offensive and troubling." Apparently, some members of "No Land Grab" admire Michael Ratner for his "civil rights" work. Nevertheless, they are still "scratching their heads and wondering when their hero will break his silence or divest his interest in the Nets."

    Shutting Down Guantanamo, Shutting Down the War on Terror

    In order to fully understand Michael Ratner's decision to agitate against the U.S. run Guantanamo prison camp, it is necessary to examine his views, from 9/11 onward, as they relate to the U.S.-led War on Terror (WOT) and the Bush Administration itself.

    Ratner's views on the Bush administration are most concisely articulated in a "Letter to the Left," signed by him and issued on Sept. 23, 2003. The letter was intended to rally leftists and leftist organizations to defeat George Bush for the "sake of peace, democracy, social justice and racial equality." The letter states, in part, "It [the Bush Administration] has demolished whatever minimal stability has been achieved in treaties and agreements over the last half century to reduce the threat of nuclear war. It openly seeks world domination through military force and preemptive war -with Iran, North Korea, and Latin America now in its sights after Iraq. Its arrogant and reckless quest for a new US empire is inflamed by a frightening fundamentalist religious zeal. Using its fraudulent "war on terrorism" and playing on the public's fears after 9/11, the Bush Administration has savaged the rights of immigrants and foreign nationals, has fanned racism, conducted arrests without warrants, declared detainees "enemy combatants" without the right to counsel and access to families, has vastly expanded spying on the public, and is now preparing an even more repressive Patriot Act II while packing the courts with compliant right-wing ideologues.[emphases added] Among those who signed an accompanying petition were numerous radical leftists and communists and communist sympathizers including Leslie Cagan, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Arthur Kinoy and Ossie Davis.

    On September 11, 2001 Michael Ratner was jogging along the Hudson River in New York City when Islamists crashed fuel-laden airliners into the Twin Towers in a declaration of total war against the U.S. Ratner has said that he took considerable time in formulating his views regarding 9/11 and its aftermath but on Nov. 20, 2001 an article he wrote in October 2001 titled, "Moving Towards a Police State (Or Have We Arrived)" was published in CounterPunch, a far-left leaning webzine published by totalitarian radical Alexander Cockburn.

    Composed by Ratner as the Tower wreckage was still smoldering, Moving Towards a Police State is a conspiratorial condemnation of the Bush Administration's reaction to 9/11 and it blames the U.S. for having brought the attack upon itself, a point Ratner reiterated in March 2002 when he said, "If the US government truly wants its people to be safer and wants terrorist threats to diminish, it must make fundamental changes in its foreign policies... particularly its unqualified support for Israel, and its embargo of Iraq, its bombing of Afghanistan, and its actions in Saudi Arabia."

    In the CounterPunch article, Ratner tipped his hand concerning his stance on the rights of Islamist terrorist suspects by voicing his opposition to the Bush administrations declared intent to establish military commissions in order to try such suspects. Ratner, in explaining why he opposed the commissions, made an unsubstantiated accusation that "The President is literally getting away with murder."

    Ratner's CounterPunch article condemns every single aspect of the Bush Administration's response to 9/11, including its establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, its granting of more robust surveillance powers to the FBI and CIA, its establishment of the Patriot Act, its close look at U.S. non-citizens and illegal aliens of Middle Eastern descent and its powers to deport such non-citizens. Ratner's CounterPunch article is important since it indicates how quickly after 9/11 he and CCR began the shift from representing and advocating for leftist radicals to defending suspected Islamic radicals and Islamic terrorists.

    That shift took a giant leap in April 2002 when CCR filed a class action suit, Turkmen vs Ashcroft, on behalf of illegal aliens and non-citizens who were picked up for questioning shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Filed against former Attorney General John Ashcroft, current FBI Director Robert Mueller, former INS Commissioner James Ziglar, and officials of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, the suit alleges "that the INS arrested this group on the pretext of minor immigration violations and secretly detained them for the weeks and months the FBI took to clear them of terrorism, in violation of the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law." The suit seeks damages for all the parties picked up, detained and questioned in the days following 9/11. The case is presently winding its way through U.S. courts.

    Since the Turkmen filing, CCR has been directly involved in other major suits filed on behalf of terror suspects. These include Habib vs Bush and Rasul vs Bush, both of which argue against the Bush Administration's contention that since the Guantanamo prison camp is outside of U.S. jurisdiction, its inhabitants are not entitled to access U.S. courts. CCR eventually enjoined both cases under Rasul vs Bush and on June 28, 2004 won an important ruling in that case which ultimately cleared the way for it to gain direct access to Guantanamo's prisoners.

    In arguing against the U.S. response to 9/11, Michael Ratner states that only the United Nations has both the legal and moral authority to respond to the 9/11 attacks. Ratner offers his view of a proper response to 9/11, saying that the U.S. should "treat the attacks on September 11 as a crime against humanity, establish a UN tribunal, extradite the suspects, or if that fails, capture them with a UN force, and try them."

    Ratner also believes that key figures of the Bush Administration, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA head George Tenet and General Ricardo Sanchez should receive similar treatment for what Ratner perceives as their involvement in ordering the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. In late November 2004 he filed a complaint in German courts invoking "international law" against the three and urged German authorities to arrest any member of the trio that set foot on German soil.

    This was not the only time that Ratner and CCR tried using foreign courts to fight U.S. policy related to 9/11. In January 2004 Ratner teamed up with eight international jurists to investigate what they alleged to be British and U.S. war crimes committed during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Part of the effort involved attempting to bring criminal charges against British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The team also sought to investigate the accidental killing of international journalists by Coalition forces during that same operation, implying that they were deliberately killed by U.S. and British forces. Phil Shiner, a British "social justice" lawyerwho represents the anti-war group Human Shield Action, led the effort against the two countries. In an article published in the Ottawa Citizen on January 27, 2004, Ratner suggested that the true goals of the investigation were to curb U.S. military power and to limit the number of allies that it could enlist in future conflicts. "The U.K. is like the Achilles' heel of getting at the United States," he said when asked if the U.S. was the ultimate target of his and Shiner's effort to prosecute Tony Blair.

    Ratner has publicly stated that his intentions regarding the prisoners at Guantanamo is not necessarily to free them, but to help them gain access to legal representation. And a press
    sympathetic to Ratner and his causes has helped reinforce this view by exclusively portraying him as a dedicated "civil rights" and "Constitutional" lawyer, one who fights for the rights of the oppressed and in the interest of protecting the U.S. Constitution from a government intent on subverting it. But on March 10, 2004, months before the Rasul ruling, Ratner went to the United Nations with British actor and committed Communist Corin Redgrave, who heads the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission, and demanded the immediate closure of Guantanamo prison. Accompanying them were relatives of three Guantanamo prisoners. "It [Guantanamo] is a total denial of human rights. Our message is therefore very clear: Every detainee in Guantanamo must be repatriated forthwith to their countries...We are very, very, confident that sooner rather than later... they will be free," said Redgrave, the spokesman for the group.

    More then a year later, emboldened by theRasul ruling, CCR finally made that same intention irrefutably clear.

    A few months after the positive Rasul ruling, Ratner published an interview in book-form titled Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. Its cover featured a picture of U.S. soldiers hovering menacingly over a gagged and bound prisoner. The book is a rambling indictment of the Bush Doctrine and the treatment of terror suspects held at Guantanamo. Ratner's interviewer was former NLG associate Ellen Ray. Ray, along with NLG and CCR lawyer William Schaap, founded the conspiracy magazine Covert Action Quarterly(CAQ), the successor to Philip Agee's anti-CIA Covert Action Bulletin. Ray and Schaap founded CAQ in 1978 while participating in a Communist youth festival in Cuba. Philip Agee assisted the effort. Ray also worked for the National Lawyers Guild as a "legal aide." Terry Allen, who worked for CAQ from 1990-98, questioned its legitimacy by insisting that its staff had once seriously debated whether or not to publish an article stating that Adolf Hitler was alive and well and living in Antarctica. Overall, Allen's account of the internal struggles at CAQ paints it as a bizarre conspiracy mill and Ray and Schaap as absurd characters who act like "corporate thugs."

    Nevertheless, Ratner's book continues receiving international attention and rave reviews from the Left. As a propaganda tool it has helped tremendously in providing impetus to and public support for the Ratner-led effort to free Guantanamo's prisoners.

    More than a year after publishing What the World Should Know, Michael Ratner and CCR have finally made absolutely clear their intention to shut down Guantanamo prison camp in a proclamation posted on CCR's website. Emboldened by his success at chipping away at the foundations of the War on Terror, Ratner has just opened a new law practice to assist in that effort. Those who visit the new firm's website will be greeted by a marquee stating:

    "Ratner, DiCaprio and Chomsky LLC

    Countering the War Abroad and the War at Home"

    Michael Ratner has now recruited the help of some of America's most powerful lawyers and prestigious law firms in helping to limit America's ability to protect itself from Islamist thugs and psychopaths. By signing on to Ratner's crusade, those lawyers and firms have become classic "useful idiots."

    On 9/11 our Islamist enemies made abundantly clear their wish to bring the U.S. to its knees. And since shortly after that horrific day, Michael Ratner has been assisting them.

    That's only natural, since both he and the Islamists share the same enemy.

    I attempted to interview Michael Ratner for this article. I was told by his spokesperson that he was unavailable for comment.

    I thank Maria Horvath and J. Michael Waller for their contributions to this article, and David Horowitz for his patience.

    http://antiprotester.blogspot.com/20...r-fighting.htm
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