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‘Taking on Goliath’ in a fight for human rights
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BY: SUSAN H. KAHN Assistant Editor
Michael Ratner is not a big man, but like David, he has made a career of taking on Goliath … and winning.
President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the high-profile human rights attorney has been lead counsel in the defense of the Guantanamo Bay detainees and in the prosecution of government officials accused of torture and war crimes at Abu Ghraib prison.
In a recent speech at John Carroll University, the feisty, fast-talking lawyer described the Bush administration’s trampling of human rights in its conduct of the war on terror.
Ratner, 64, is the son of Harry Ratner. When his father died, the Shaker Heights native chose not to join the family business, Forest City Enterprises. But representing terrorists wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when he first became a lawyer with the CCR in the ’70s.
“Then, we were defending civil rights of protesters and those who opposed the (Vietnam) war,” he says.
A New York City resident, Ratner says he was traumatized by Sept. 11, and he wasn’t eager to defend the people Vice President Dick Cheney characterized as “the worst of the worst.” However, in November 2001 when President Bush issued a military order allowing the U.S. “to pick up any non-citizen anywhere in the world, imprison them without charges, and (deny them) access to legal representation,” he felt he could argue on behalf of human rights.
“Guantanamo is iconic of everything the U.S. government is doing wrong: denial of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, torture and covertly sending people to other nations for torture, and trials in military ‘kangaroo courts,’” says Ratner. Unchecked, government abrogation of fundamental rights will spread, he prdicts. “Our clients are ‘canaries in a coal mine.’”
Ratner offers a brief history of the CCR’s crusade on behalf of detainees’ rights. The first legal challenge to the administration’s detention policies was the 2002 case of Rasul v. Bush in which the CCR argued for the prisoner’s right of habeas corpus (a document requiring that a detained person by brought before a court to decide the legality of their detention or imprisonment). After working its way up from the lower courts, in 2004 the Supreme Court restored habeas corpus.
The next attempt to strip detainees of the right to file habeas corpus petitions, as well as limit their access to counsel, was the Detainee Treatment Act, which Congress passed in 2005. The following year, Congress passed the Military Commission Act, which makes possible the permanent detention and torture of even U.S. citizens as long as they are classified enemy combatants. Portions of the act are now being challenged in the courts.
Ratner cites a recent study by Seton Hall Law School Professor Joshua Denbaux, which found that only 5% of the detainees were picked up by the U.S.; 86% were turned in by Afghan warlords and the Northern Alliance in Pakistan in return for large bounties. The study further noted that only 8% of the prisoners had anything to do with Al Qaeda.
“There are 385 people left in Guantanamo,” says Ratner. “There have been three successful suicides; there are hunger strikes going on and a lot of torture.”
He describes the experiences of CCR clients known as “The Tipton Three.” The young Muslim men are British citizens who were in Afghanistan for benign reasons. Wrongly identified as having appeared in a videotape with Osama bin Laden, they were picked up and shipped to Guantanamo, where they endured months of beatings, harassment, sleep deprivation, being held in stress positions, and exposure to extremes in temperature.
“When MI-5 (British intelligence) finally discovered the men had ironclad alibis, they were released,” says Ratner. “Then the U.S. asked them to become informants!”
Despite public outcries when the torture at Abu Ghraib became public, Ratner notes the administration has been successful in keeping culpability from going up the chain of command.
“It went as far as Janis Karpinski (the brigadier general in charge of the prison), but she was a scapegoat,” he says. “We were running torture operations in the U.S. from the highest levels.”
In addition to abuse by the U.S. military, Ratner addressed the issue of “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of sending suspected terrorists to other countries with “a higher tolerance,” and even less oversight, of extreme methods of interrogation.
“We are outsourcing torture,” he says. “We put people on ‘torture taxis,’ small private jets that take them to Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Morocco.”
He tells the story of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian detained by U.S. officials in New York then covertly shipped off to Syria. Then Ratner shows a short, affecting videotape in which Arar describes his 10-month ordeal in a Syrian prison. Under torture, Arar admitted to being at the infamous Al Farouk terrorist training camp, but it was a lie. Arar was cleared and repatriated to Canada although he remains on the U.S. “watch list.”
“Torture is a poor technique for gaining reliable information. It distresses me to have spent my whole career fighting torture performed by dictators around the world only to be faced with a certain acceptance of it in my own country,” Ratner says. “We have lost the moral high ground.”
skahn@cjn.org
President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the high-profile human rights attorney has been lead counsel in the defense of the Guantanamo Bay detainees and in the prosecution of government officials accused of torture and war crimes at Abu Ghraib prison.
In a recent speech at John Carroll University, the feisty, fast-talking lawyer described the Bush administration’s trampling of human rights in its conduct of the war on terror.
Ratner, 64, is the son of Harry Ratner. When his father died, the Shaker Heights native chose not to join the family business, Forest City Enterprises. But representing terrorists wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when he first became a lawyer with the CCR in the ’70s.
“Then, we were defending civil rights of protesters and those who opposed the (Vietnam) war,” he says.
A New York City resident, Ratner says he was traumatized by Sept. 11, and he wasn’t eager to defend the people Vice President Dick Cheney characterized as “the worst of the worst.” However, in November 2001 when President Bush issued a military order allowing the U.S. “to pick up any non-citizen anywhere in the world, imprison them without charges, and (deny them) access to legal representation,” he felt he could argue on behalf of human rights.
“Guantanamo is iconic of everything the U.S. government is doing wrong: denial of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, torture and covertly sending people to other nations for torture, and trials in military ‘kangaroo courts,’” says Ratner. Unchecked, government abrogation of fundamental rights will spread, he prdicts. “Our clients are ‘canaries in a coal mine.’”
Ratner offers a brief history of the CCR’s crusade on behalf of detainees’ rights. The first legal challenge to the administration’s detention policies was the 2002 case of Rasul v. Bush in which the CCR argued for the prisoner’s right of habeas corpus (a document requiring that a detained person by brought before a court to decide the legality of their detention or imprisonment). After working its way up from the lower courts, in 2004 the Supreme Court restored habeas corpus.
The next attempt to strip detainees of the right to file habeas corpus petitions, as well as limit their access to counsel, was the Detainee Treatment Act, which Congress passed in 2005. The following year, Congress passed the Military Commission Act, which makes possible the permanent detention and torture of even U.S. citizens as long as they are classified enemy combatants. Portions of the act are now being challenged in the courts.
Ratner cites a recent study by Seton Hall Law School Professor Joshua Denbaux, which found that only 5% of the detainees were picked up by the U.S.; 86% were turned in by Afghan warlords and the Northern Alliance in Pakistan in return for large bounties. The study further noted that only 8% of the prisoners had anything to do with Al Qaeda.
“There are 385 people left in Guantanamo,” says Ratner. “There have been three successful suicides; there are hunger strikes going on and a lot of torture.”
He describes the experiences of CCR clients known as “The Tipton Three.” The young Muslim men are British citizens who were in Afghanistan for benign reasons. Wrongly identified as having appeared in a videotape with Osama bin Laden, they were picked up and shipped to Guantanamo, where they endured months of beatings, harassment, sleep deprivation, being held in stress positions, and exposure to extremes in temperature.
“When MI-5 (British intelligence) finally discovered the men had ironclad alibis, they were released,” says Ratner. “Then the U.S. asked them to become informants!”
Despite public outcries when the torture at Abu Ghraib became public, Ratner notes the administration has been successful in keeping culpability from going up the chain of command.
“It went as far as Janis Karpinski (the brigadier general in charge of the prison), but she was a scapegoat,” he says. “We were running torture operations in the U.S. from the highest levels.”
In addition to abuse by the U.S. military, Ratner addressed the issue of “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of sending suspected terrorists to other countries with “a higher tolerance,” and even less oversight, of extreme methods of interrogation.
“We are outsourcing torture,” he says. “We put people on ‘torture taxis,’ small private jets that take them to Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Morocco.”
He tells the story of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian detained by U.S. officials in New York then covertly shipped off to Syria. Then Ratner shows a short, affecting videotape in which Arar describes his 10-month ordeal in a Syrian prison. Under torture, Arar admitted to being at the infamous Al Farouk terrorist training camp, but it was a lie. Arar was cleared and repatriated to Canada although he remains on the U.S. “watch list.”
“Torture is a poor technique for gaining reliable information. It distresses me to have spent my whole career fighting torture performed by dictators around the world only to be faced with a certain acceptance of it in my own country,” Ratner says. “We have lost the moral high ground.”
skahn@cjn.org
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