NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., 21 December 2003 — Michael Ratner is in a cavernous college hall speaking to hundreds of students one recent evening. He’s hyped. He’s talking fast. The crusader at the lectern.
This is what he loves to do: sound the alarm about government abuses. He’s been doing it for more than 30 years, and Sept. 11, 2001, launched a new era for legal activism. So he’s doing the “our-civil-liberties-are-endangered” speech, about rights trammeled, laws grown draconian and Muslims under siege.
The Islamic Society of Rutgers University is his host. They are all courageous even for showing up, Ratner is telling his listeners, considering that “there are people in this room who are going to report this meeting to the FBI.”
Later, surrounded by students eager to hear more from this famous international human rights lawyer, he pulls out a beige baseball cap and plops it on his balding head.
“I forgot to wear this earlier,” Ratner says jovially, and beams.
“Guantanamo Bay Bar Association,” the cap says. And if such an association actually existed, Ratner would be its dean.
Three US presidents have authorized the detention of foreigners at Guantanamo. Ratner has fought them all: first in the early 1990s, when Haitian immigrants were held there, and now, during the “war on terror,” when hundreds of Arab Muslims are detained in isolation with no legal rights, a controversy the Supreme Court is now considering.
Ratner isn’t alone in his Guantanamo battles. The cap came from fellow lawyer Eugene Fidell, who is representing Capt. James Yee, a Muslim US military chaplain at Guantanamo who was smeared with an allegation of espionage but later charged with lesser offenses unrelated to terror. Fidell said wryly in a telephone interview that there will be lawyers working Guantanamo cases “for the foreseeable future.” So he printed some caps and gave one to Ratner, a lawyer he simply calls “brilliant.”
Ratner wore his cap at Rutgers like a badge of honor.
“It’s the smallest bar association in the world,” he said, delighted by the gag.
Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in Manhattan, is the kind of far-left lawyer sometimes dismissed as a fringe character. Some, especially the Bush administration, see him as a nuisance. And he has had his share of threatening e-mails from people calling him a traitor.
But Ratner is a staunch defender of human rights. For him, the crusade “means pushing them (the government) back and back from what they’re trying to do.”
He has been personally involved in some of the high-profile international human rights cases of our times. He wrote a textbook on the famed case of Joel Filartiga, a Paraguayan who won a 1984 judgment in US courts against the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner for his son’s murder. That CCR case broke ground for foreigners to sue in US courts for alleged human rights abuses under the Alien Tort Claims Act, which now is used frequently and controversially (and is being reviewed by the Supreme Court.)
Ratner fought the Chilean government over the murder of Charles Horman, a US citizen whose death during dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime was the basis of the 1982 movie “Missing.” And he battled US support in the 1980s for the Nicaraguan contras in his vain legal quest to lay blame for the execution-style murder of Benjamin Linder, a US engineer allegedly targeted by the contras.
Ratner sued the first Bush administration to stop the Gulf War. He sued the Clinton administration to stop the bombing of Kosovo. And he successfully sued on behalf of victims of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for war crimes.
When the latest round of Guantanamo Bay cases presented themselves, Ratner hesitated.
He had been deeply traumatized by Sept. 11. He lives and works downtown; his two children attend school there. He was jogging near the World Trade Center that morning, and had to run for his life. He speaks in graphic detail about the funereal existence that enveloped Lower Manhattan for weeks afterward.
And the guys at Guantanamo could have been connected to the guys who did it. So Ratner initially didn’t want to be in a position of criminally defending them; only of defending the principle of their rights.
“I first said we’re just upset over them not having a hearing and we’re very upset over the death penalty and the military tribunals. I’ll do only that. I won’t do the criminal cases, because maybe these are bad guys.”
But over time, as the detentions dragged on with no charges filed and as it began to seem, to Ratner, “an entirely coercive situation” at Guantanamo, he lost his sense of hesitation.
Still, he wonders about his clients. He has never been allowed to meet, call or write them. Lawyers have been barred from Guantanamo for two years — until this month, when a lawyer was allowed in. Because most of the detainees were arrested in Afghanistan during the US fight with the Taleban regime and the Al-Qaeda terror network, Ratner assumes he is probably not of like mind.
“I’m representing people who I may not agree with politically,” he says. “Aside from that, I’m Jewish.”
But it’s the principle he’s after. The stakes, he says, are these:
“Can the United States pick up people anywhere in the world, take them to an offshore prison camp and not have any hearings at all and keep them forever and basically wipe out court review of those cases? That’s really significant. Are we going to be a state that’s ruled by law and by checks and balances and the Constitution and human rights?”
Ratner hopes to force the answers through the cases the CCR is representing.
The CCR’s case on behalf of four Guantanamo detainees will be heard by the US Supreme Court.
In “Rasul v. Bush,” Ratner’s team has sued the administration for imprisoning the foreigners as “war-on-terror” detainees without access to lawyers, the courts or their families. A second suit, “Odah v. US,” filed on behalf of 12 detainees by the Washington law firm Shearman and Sterling, has been combined with the CCR case.
The suit will affect the 660 detainees who have been held in isolation and interrogated at Guantanamo’s infamous Camp Delta, though none has been charged for a link to global terror.
From his travels there in the early 1990s, Ratner knows the scorpions and the “banana rats” and the searing heat. He knows, too, how intently US governments have fought to prevent constitutional protections from passing through Guantanamo’s gates. In the early 1990s the United States held HIV-positive Haitians in virtual quarantine there.
President George H.W. Bush would not free them, nor would President Bill Clinton. Ratner represented the Haitians, who were seeking political asylum, and won a court order for their admission into the United States as refugees.
Though “Rasul” is pending, Ratner believes it already has borne fruit. Shortly after the Supreme Court announced its acceptance of the case, the Bush administration announced that 140 of the prisoners would be released. Then it announced that one plaintiff, Australian Muslim David Hicks, would become the first Guantanamo detainee to be granted legal representation.
Around the same time, the administration announced that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a US citizen dubbed an “enemy combatant” and held in prison, would also have access to a lawyer. The Supreme Court is considering whether to accept the Hamdi case for review as well.
These developments are intended to neutralize the lawsuits, he says; the administration’s way “of telling the court: We can be trusted as a government and that you don’t have to look at these cases.”
In another “enemy combatant” case, the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled Thursday that the Bush administration had no authority to circumvent normal procedures when it imprisoned US citizen Jose Padilla, the dirty bomb suspect, in a naval brig. The court ordered Padilla released or charged with a crime in the normal criminal justice system. (CCR wrote an amicus brief in that case too.)
In another detention case, “Turkmen v. Ashcroft,” Ratner’s CCR has sued on behalf of the thousands of immigrants rounded up in anti-terror dragnets after Sept. 11 and allegedly mistreated in jails inside the United States where they were held, sometimes for months.
The allegations of abuse were buttressed, in part, by the Justice Department’s own inspector general, which Thursday cited a pattern of verbal and physical abuse of some detainees.
The CCR plans to file another lawsuit next year on behalf of Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian detained by US officials in New York, then covertly shipped off Syria through a US policy of “rendition.” Arar claims he was tortured for several months in Syria, and the CCR claims that US officials may have sent Arar to Syria for that very reason.
Critics see Ratner and his CCR as paranoid.
“I do think that groups like CCR have overreacted and they see more of a threat than exists,” says Paul Rosenzweig, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who debated Ratner last month on C-SPAN. “They have an apocalyptic vision of government, which is usually overly sensitive. But that doesn’t mean they’re always wrong, and the truth is that government does overreach.”
Criticism does not bother Ratner. He has accustomed to his battles being long and hard. That, in a way, is the beauty of it.
“What I find happens in a lot of this work we do is that you start things that look quixotic in the beginning, but in the end you turn out to be right. Look at the Guantanamo cases. We took those the January after the Sept. 11 attacks, and now (in amicus briefs) we’re getting generals and former POWs and law firms crawling out of the woodwork to be on those cases with us.”