WHAT AWAITS THE BUSH REGIME IN 2009

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JOSHUA HOLLAND, ALTERNET - Since the attacks of 9/11, the Center for
Constitutional Rights and its president, Michael Ratner, have been at
the center of the battle. . . 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. . .

Holland: You've said that you will continue to go after these officials
for torture, even after they're out of office.

Ratner: Oh, yes. In fact, the case in Spain is already far along -- I've
been spending more time in Europe than I ever did to get these cases
going.

Holland: Might this go as high as George W. Bush himself?

Ratner: Well, we didn't name Bush or Cheney in any of these cases
because they, as current office holders -- as essentially heads of state
-- have immunity from national courts. They wouldn't be immune from a
U.N. court, if there were ever a kind of Nuremberg Tribunal -- but they
are from national courts. So while we have them named as unindicted
co-conspirators, we don't list them as actual defendants. But we
certainly will, afterwards. . .

Holland: You're saying that after 2009 -- January of 2009 -- you will be
adding them to the complaints?

Ratner: Oh, absolutely. They're on the hook then. And it's going to be a
hot world for them, because the world knows this -- this is an emperor's
new clothes situation, because everyone in the world knows that the U.S.
is running a torture program.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/69421/?page=entire

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