The Man Behind the Attack on Guantanamo
By Rocco
DiPippo
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 16, 2005
The
general leading the force to free the captive enemy from the U.S. detention
center in Guantanamo Bay, and inflict a humiliating defeat on the United States
is so-called “civil rights” and “Constitutional” attorney Michael
Ratner. It was Ratner who led the way in recruiting
elite lawyers to defend the enemy combatants being interrogated at Gitmo.
But Ratner is a long-time leader of two pro-Communist and anti-American
organizations who have for decades have lent aid and comfort to America's
enemies in the Cold War and beyond.
Michael Ratner is a lawyer who began his legal
career in the late 1960s at the National
Lawyers Guild, a Soviet created front group which still embraces its
Communist heritage. He worked his way up through the NLG’s radical ranks
to become its president, then moved on to hold the same position at the Center
for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which share's the NLG's anti-American
radicalism and was founded by pro-Castro lawyers Arthur Kinoy and William
Kunstler. Among its many outrages, the CCR has defended domestic and
international terrorists, and has honored Ratner's NLG
colleague and convicted
terrorist enabler Lynne
Stewart, a modern Legal Left
idol. Since 9/11, Ratner and his comrades have attempted to extend
undeserved “civil rights” on Islamist murderers with notable success. On this
front, Ratner and the Legal Left have dealt America its few setbacks in the War
on Terror.
One year ago the U.S. suffered its
first major loss in this war, a strategic and propaganda defeat, related to
America’s abilities to imprison and interrogate enemies that it captures. Abu
Ghraib was a huge propaganda victory, both for Islamists, who used it to
“justify” their violent attacks, and for fifth column leftists, who made use of
the media’s saturation coverage to portray the U.S. as the world’s biggest
oppressor, the Bush administration as a cabal of Nazi thugs, and the Iraq as an
immoral undertaking. The gross overplay of that prison scandal in concert with
other overblown and sometimes fabricated stories – like Newsweek’s
“Koran in the toilet” canard – emboldened
Islamic terrorists, eroded U.S. public support for the War on Terror, and
damaged America’s credibility around the world.
Now, as
our memories of 9/11 continue to fade into the past, Michael Ratner has opened
another battle against the War on Terror – at Guantanamo Bay. Never mind that
almost all of the prisoners at Guantanamo were picked up by U.S. forces doing
battle for the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, or that many of them are,
in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld words, “the worst of the worst.” Never mind that
al-Qaeda members and close associates of Osama bin Laden fill their ranks, or
that they’re trained to fabricate tales of abuse to erode their enemy’s morale.
Although most of them are violent religious fanatics, and although they’ve been
treated better than any captured combatants in world history, Michael Ratner
and his lawyers want to provide them the chance to trumpet their “grievances”
to a sympathetic press, exploit legal loopholes, and ultimately return to the
battlefield.
The fight to liberate Guantanamo
prison
As the
wreckage of the Twin Towers was still smoldering, Michael Ratner began planning
his attack on America’s post-9/11 defense strategy. Realizing that it would
take major legal clout to seriously subvert the War on Terror, Ratner began
taking steps to attract major U.S law firms to his cause. First, he adopted a
high public profile against the Bush administration’s reaction to 9/11 by
savaging every facet of its plan to protect the U.S. from future attack. Working
the “civil liberties” angle for all its worth, Ratner raged at the Patriot Act,
railed against profiling techniques designed to ferret out Islamic terrorists
in our midst, and opposed invading Afghanistan to hunt down and capture Osama
bin Laden and his Taliban henchmen.
The
mainstream press assisted Ratner by promoting him as a champion of civil rights
while carefully hiding his lifelong radicalims from the American public (see
below). When the Islamists’ battleground changed, Ratner took a prominent role
in antiwar movement by opposing Operation Iraqi Freedom. Ratner became a staple
of antiwar, anti-Bush events. More importantly, he filed a series of
high-profile nuisance suits against the Bush administration, one of which attempted
to have Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrested and tried for
“war crimes” by German courts.
In April 2002, Ratner led the Center for
Constitutional Rights in filing a class action suit, Turkmen v. Ashcroft,
on behalf of Muslim illegal aliens and non-citizens who were picked up for
questioning shortly after the 9/11 attacks. 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.”
Filed against former Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert
Mueller, former INS Commissioner James Ziglar, and officials of the
Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the Turkmen case catapulted
Ratner into the legal spotlight and – according to him – gained him valuable legal
help from other firms once too nervous to touch cases involving 9/11 suspects.
He set out to recruit pro bono help, and sympathetic leftist
counselors now had fewer inhibitions to joining him.
After suffering a series of legal setbacks in his
pro-terrorist legal crusade, Ratner won a major
victory in Rasul v. Bush, a suit he brought seeking to grant Islamist terror
suspects access to U.S. courts. That
victory cleared the way for him to gain direct access to Guantanamo’s
prisoners. With this, the trickle of queries from other law firms soon became a
steady stream of volunteers to his cause.
Now it’s a
torrent, and major U.S. firms including Clifford Chance; Dorsey & Whitney; Allen & Overy;
Covington & Burling; and Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dorr – the
last of which also does business
with companies involved in the U.S. defense, national security, and government
contracts sectors – have teamed up with Michael Ratner and CCR to provide
legal services to terrorists and terrorist suspects. (Does the firm know
Ratner’s background? If so, does the government know about its connection to
Ratner?) Today, teams of lawyers fly to Guantanamo Bay to help people who, if
given the chance, would kill all of them and make the Koran their only basis of
law.
Obviously,
there are many ethical lawyers and law firms that represent violent criminals
and defend those with whom they may have deep moral and ideological
disagreements – but Ratner is not one of them. “I don't usually take cases
where I disagree with the politics of the people involved,” he said in a 2002 interview, clarifying
where he stands on anti-American terrorism.
Ratner’s
odd view of “justice” stems from his decades in service to the radical cause.
Ratner’s pro-Communist, pro-terrorist views are perhaps best illustrated by his
affinity for Cuba’s totalitarian regime and by his love of the man who set up
Castro’s KGB-inspired prison system, Ché Guevara. Guevara – who was known for
taping his victims’ mouths shut to avoid hearing their screams as he tortured
and murdered his way through Cuba – is, despite his real life incompetence, a
hero of mythical proportions to the Left. Ratner chose to sing Che’s praises in
a1997 book:
…for many of us seeking to
change our society, Cuba was a desirable model. And it was Ché Guevara, more
than any other figure, who embodied both that revolution and solidarity with
peoples fighting to be free from U.S. hegemony…Ché has remained my hero ever since. (Emphasis added.)
In the
same book, Ratner recounts a hiking trip he once took to retrace the path of
Guevara:
Tears streamed down my cheeks,
my energy was renewed and I completed the hike. To be like Ché: 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.
Though
he fights to keep violent convicted criminals who flee to Cuba safe from
extradition back to America, “civil rights champion” Ratner has never spoken up
for the civil rights of non-violent Cuban dissidents – including the
journalists, artists, and activists who have been tossed into Castro’s horrific
prisons after mock trials. Ironically, some of those hellholes are a short
distance from the U.S. run camp at Guantanamo Bay.
Ratner’s
CCR has almost always received modest funding, most of it from far-Left
organizations and leftist-run foundations. But funding of CCR increased by
leaps and bounds after Ratner adopted his post-9/11 high profile.
The George
Soros-funded Open
Society Institute, the Tides
Foundation, and other leftist support groups began heavily funding Ratner
and CCR’s anti-Bush, antiwar, anti-American agendas.
Thanks to these forces, the proper relationship between
prisoner and guard, deemed vital for successful interrogation, has now been
damaged and the Department of Defense (DOD) faces a dilemma. Ratner’s suit has
already somewhat undermined its effectiveness at Guantanamo Bay. If the DOD
closes Gitmo, the prisoners are set free or are moved to the U.S. where it will
be nearly impossible to deny them access to U.S. courts. If the department
moves the prisoners to another location outside of U.S. jurisdiction, Ratner
and his fifth column legal army will simply begin another high-profile fight
for the prisoners’ “rights,” and the propaganda battle begins anew with
continued erosion of popular and political support for the War on Terror.
Though
the battle for Guantanamo’s prisoners is not yet over, but from the time the
first plane-load of lawyers touched down in Cuba, two things became abundantly
clear: Islamist psychopaths had won a major victory against America’s resolve
to fight them.
And
Michael Ratner, George Soros, and a host of prestigious American law firms
helped them.
Rocco DiPippo, a free-lance political writer, publishes The Autonomist blog and is a contributor to David Horowitz’s Moonbat Central group blog.