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This week, the next round in the Bush administration's epic struggle against 800 years of Anglo-American legal tradition will unfold as the Supreme Court hears the latest in the "Guantanamo cases." The case will hinge on the question of whether detainees being held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base have the right to a day in court to challenge the circumstances of their imprisonment. At issue is the more fundamental matter of whether the president of the United States has the power to detain people indefinitely and without due process under the rubric of a nebulous "war on terror."
Since the attacks of 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights and its president, Michael Ratner, have been at the center of the battle; CCR's played David to Bush's Goliath from the very beginning.
Ratner and his colleagues are not new to using the legal system to keep the government in check, nor are they unfamiliar with the controversy that inevitably surrounds that process. The Center, born of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, has been at the forefront of human rights litigation ever since. CCR pursued the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in courts around the world and sued both the first Bush administration in an attempt to stop the Gulf War and the Clinton administration for bombing Kosovo. Ratner served as a special adviser to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president of Haiti who was deposed in a U.S.-supported coup, and won a key war crimes case against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
But it's been the excesses of the Bush administration, especially at "Gitmo," that have thrust Ratner and what was once a radical legal shop into the international spotlight. "Here's Michael Ratner and CCR," Ratner said, "who were once considered to be firmly on the left but are now defending bread-and-butter constitutional issues that we never really thought would be in jeopardy, like habeas corpus." His involvement in what would become such a "mainstream" legal fight was "a transition for me personally as well as for the center politically," he added.
Ratner will be named the seventh winner of the Nation Institute/ Puffin Foundation award for "creative citizenship" this week. "I like the description," he said. "It's for taking on the status quo in a socially responsible way and in a way that required taking a risk. For me it's not the personal aspect, it's the acknowledgment that you have to take risks in this very difficult country if you want to make any real progress."
AlterNet interviewed Ratner at his New York home to discuss the case, Guantanamo and the ramifications of the so-called "war on terror."
Joshua Holland: Let's start with a little background on the case.
Michael Ratner: This all started shortly after the attacks of 9/11, in fact on Nov. 14, 2001, when the president issued what he called Military Order No. 1. Military Order No. 1 was what I call the "coup d'etat order," because it basically said the president could pick up any noncitizen -- at that point; it's now been extended to citizens -- anywhere in the world and hold them forever, and not allow them to go into a court to get what we call a writ of habeas corpus. That's the right to go to court and challenge your detention. So they could simply be held forever if they were a noncitizen and alleged terrorist -- not just Al Qaeda, but all "alleged terrorists." And the other part of the order said that if they were tried, they were to be tried by special military commissions.
So that's six weeks after 9/11, and we have what I called at the time the underpinnings of a police state. By that time, you already had the PATRIOT Act -- by Nov. 13 -- you had the roundups in New York City and around the country of noncitizen Muslims, with 5,000 of them taken to various jails, so you had a lot of bad stuff going on already. But that order of Nov. 13 was a power grab by the executive that I was just astounded by.
But, of course, that's not even close to what we have today. I mean when I look back at that time, what I thought was going on then was bad, but it's Mickey Mouse compared to what's happened since.
At the same time, you have to understand that people were still very nervous, the city was still mourning and it was a situation in which we were all still very frightened. There was that anthrax stuff and a lot of talk of sleeper cells everywhere. But when I read that order of Nov. 13, I said to myself: "We have to do something about this. We're going to represent the first people taken under this order." And even though there was talk at that time about how those being picked up were "the worst of the worst," I thought that this right, the right of habeas corpus, is so fundamental that it has to be defended. The difference between a police state and a nonpolice state is, fundamentally, whether the executive can pick you up and disappear you or whether you can go to a court and challenge the executive, whether you can say: "What's the legal reason you're holding me?"
See more stories tagged with: guantanamo, michael rattner, center for constitutional
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
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