Michael Ratner, CCR, A Great Warrior For Justice & The People's Law Has Died at 71

[Peter Lemkin]

Yet another of my heroes died this week.....the best the legal profession has had, IMHO.

The groundbreaking human rights attorney Michael Ratner has died at the age of 72. For over four decades, he defended, investigated and spoke up for victims of human rights abuses across the world. Ratner served as the longtime president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. In 2002, the center brought the first case against the George W. Bush administration for the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court eventually sided with the center in a landmark 2008 decision when it struck down the law that stripped Guantánamo prisoners of their habeas corpus rights. Ratner began working on Guantánamo in the 1990s, when he fought the first Bush administration's use of the military base to house Haitian refugees. We begin today's show with a speech he gave in 2007 when he was awarded the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The trailblazing human rights attorney Michael Ratner has died at the age of 72. For over four decades, Michael Ratner defended, investigated and spoke up for victims of human rights abuses across the world. He served as the longtime head of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Attorney David Cole told The New York Times, quote, "Under his leadership, the center grew from a small but scrappy civil rights organization into one of the leading human rights organizations in the world. He sued some of the most powerful people in the world on behalf of some of the least powerful." In 2002, the center brought the first case against the George W. Bush administration for the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court eventually sided with the center in a landmark 2008 decision when it struck down the law that stripped Guantánamo prisoners of their habeas corpus rights. Ratner began working on Guantánamo in the 1990s, when he fought the first Bush administration's use of the military base to house Haitian refugees.
Michael Ratner's activism and human rights work dated back to the 1960s. He was a student at Columbia Law School during the 1968 student strike there. Michael was a clerk for the legendary Federal Judge Constance Baker Motley. When he graduated from law school, she was the first African-American woman judge and protégé of Thurgood Marshall. In a 2004 letter, Constance Baker Motley wrote, "Michael Ratner was in retrospect, the ablest law clerk I have had in my tenure on the bench."
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1971. His first case centered on a lawsuit filed on behalf of prisoners killed and injured in the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York. Michael Ratner was deeply involved in Latin America and the Caribbean, challenging U.S. policy in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. In 1981, he brought the first challenge under the War Powers Resolution to the use of troops in El Salvador, as well as a suit against U.S. officials on behalf of Nicaraguans raped, murdered and tortured by U.S.-backed contras. In 1991, he led the center's challenge to the authority of President George H.W. Bush to go to war against Iraq without congressional consent.
A decade later, he would become a leading critic of the George W. Bush administration, filing lawsuits related to Guantánamo, torture, domestic surveillance and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also helped launch the group Palestine Legal to defend the rights of protesters in the U.S. calling for Palestinian human rights. In recent years, he was the chief attorney for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and became a leading critic of the U.S. crackdown on whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. He also served as Democracy Now!'s attorney for many years and was the husband of Karen Ranucci, a longtime member of the Democracy Now! family.
Today we spend the hour looking at the life and legacy of Michael Ratner. Later, we'll be joined by three lawyers who worked closely with Michael over the years, but we begin with a speech Michael Ratner gave in 2007, when he was awarded the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.

MICHAEL RATNER: Over the last few years, I've become acquainted with a man named Henri Alleg. Henri Alleg is a French Algerian in his eighties who was water-torturedor, as this administration says, waterboardedby the French. Here is how Henri Alleg described his water torture, a practice that goes back to the Inquisition: "The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. ... I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs ... as long as I could. But I couldn't hold on for more than a few [moments]. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me."

Think about Henri Alleg when you hear the CIA talk about enhanced interrogation techniques. Or think about a terrible agony, that of death itselfthat of death itselftaking over you when you hear our new attorney general refuse to condemn waterboarding, or when you hear that some of our Democratic leaders were briefed and made not a peepnot a peepof objection.

Let there be no doubt, the Bush administration tortures. It disappears people. It holds people forever in offshore penal colonies like Guantánamo. It renders them to be tortured in other countries. This is what was done to CCR's client Maher Arar, who was rendered to Syria for torture. And sadly, a majority of our Congress, our courts and our media have given Bush a free handand, in fact, worse, have been the handmaidens of the torture and detention program. But it has not been given a free hand by the Center for Constitutional Rights. It has not been given a free hand by The Nation. It has not been given a free hand by Jeremy or Naomi.

Today we're in the midst of a pitched battle, a pitched rattled to put this country back, at least ostensibly, on the page of fundamental rights and moral decency. The battle is difficult, and the road is long and hard. On occasion, I get pessimistic. Sometimes I and my colleagues feel like Sisyphus. Twicenot just once, twicewe pushed the rock up the hill and won rights for Guantánamo detainees in the Supreme Court, and twice the rock was rolled back down by Congress over those rights. So we pushed it back up again. Five days ago, we were in the Supreme Court for the third time. It was difficult, more difficult than before, because the justices have changed. Four are antediluvians, lost forever to humanity.

But before I get us all depressed, we've had our victories. We've gotten lawyers to Guantánamo, stopped the most overt torture and freed half of the Guantánamo detaineesover 300. We have gotten Maher Arar out of Syria. Canada has apologized for his torture, given him a substantial recoveryin Canadian dollars, which is no embarrassment anymore. They said he was an innocent man, but he remains on the U.S. terror list. We have slowed, but not yet stopped, a remarkable grab for authoritarian power.

I also don't look hopeI also don't lose hope, because I think about the early days of Guantánamo. At first, we were few. But now, we are many. At first, when CCR began, we were the lonely warriors taking on the Bush administration at Guantánamo. Now we are many. Now we, just on Guantánamo alone, are over 600 lawyers, most from major firms of every political stripe. These lawyers have an understanding of what is at stake: liberty itself. This strugglethis struggle will be seen as one of the great chapters in the legal and political history of the United States.

Today, war, torture, disappearances, murder surround us like plagues. Most in this country go on their way oblivious. Some don't want to know and are like ostriches. Some want to justify it all. Some want to make compromises. But be warned: We are at a tipping point, a tipping point into lawlessness and medievalism. We have our work to do. For each of us, the time for talking is long, long over. This is no time for compromise, no time for political calculation. As Howard Zinn admonishes us, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. The Puffin/Nation Prize reminds us all that the job for each of us is not to be on the side of the executioners. Thank you all.

AMY GOODMAN: Attorney Michael Ratner, speaking in 2007 when he was awarded the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Michael died Wednesday at the age of 72 as a result of complications related to cancer.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today we are remembering the life and legacy of the trailblazing attorney Michael Ratner, who died on Wednesday at the age of 72. We're joined by four guests who knew Michael well on a personal and professional level.
AMY GOODMAN: Reed Brody is counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch. Michael Smith is an attorney and board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He co-authored a book with Michael called Who Killed Che?: How the CIA Got Away with Murder. We're also joined in Pittsburgh by Jules Lobel. He is the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
And joining us from London is Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, joining us from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has asylum. He has been there for almost four years. Julian Assange took refuge in the embassy in 2012. Assange wants to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex assault claims, which he has repeatedly denied. He says he fears Sweden will extradite him to the United States, where he could face trial for publishing classified information. He was represented during this time, through his years inside the embassy, by Michael Ratner.
Julian, welcome to Democracy Now! Your thoughts today on your late counsel, your late attorney and friend, Michael Ratner?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Michael touched many people throughout his life. And you're seeing some of that today. He was my personal friend and adviser, our lead lawyer in the United States and in the English language. So, people here, people associated with WikiLeaks, its various staff, and our other lawyers in the United States are grieving.
But I want to reflect a little on Michael Ratner. Michael was important, not because of hissimply because of his talent and indefatigability, political and human consistency, but because he was a role model to so many who knew him, and a role model that is immutable. Michael was not aone of these figures that plague the left so much. He was not a thundering genius, although he was brilliant. He was not someone who was ideologically hidebound. He was not someone who simply engaged in value projection or exhibitionism. Michael Ratner was aled a life which was laudatory both at theat his human level, in terms of his dealings with his family, his children, with his friends, and in terms of his work in law and political consistency. And he brought all these things together. And that is why you're seeing the outpouring that you are seeing. Because peoplebecause of Michael's sensitivity across all of these domains, he is someone that you felt interacted with you as a human being, not simply someone who wanted something in a political direction or in terms of law. And while he had his flaws, these only made you understand that he really was a figure who you could strive to emulate. And I think this is probablywill be seen his most important legacy.
The other lawyers will talk about the cases that he wasthe cases that he took. He certainly took many cases for us in relation to the ongoing, pending U.S. prosecution in the United States in relation to Chelsea Manning, in relation to banking blockades, in relation to all the politics surrounding this. He stepped forward first in relation to Guantánamo Bay, when other lawyers, such as groups associated with the ACLU, felt that this was not something that was politically achievable. But he is someone who inspires a model for people who are concerned about justice, that is achievable, not a model of self-destruction, not a model that is unable to achieve because it requires some particular kind of genius that cannot be worked towards. And that is something that deeply affected our young lawyers in the United Statesfor example
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Julian
JULIAN ASSANGE: [inaudible]
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julian, I wanted specifically to ask you about this issue of the model that he provided to others. Could you talk a little bit about his impact both in terms of the work he did in defending whistleblowers like yourself, but also in terms of his ability to take the human rights issue to an international level and to deal across countries and mobilize legal battles across borders?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. I mean, I've dealt with many lawyers in the United States and many people in the United States. And some of those, although they proclaim to be concerned with the abuse of state power in the United States, are in fact, themselves, very provincial and, in some ways, American exceptionalists of their own. Michael cut completely across that. He was genuinely concerned about people in Guatemala, about me, as an Australian, about people who face similar problems in Palestine, about people who have been extradited from the United Kingdom. And he was able to work with these other groups and other lawyers across jurisdictions, because they perceived that his genuine human concern for them was not simply about grabbing some prize that he could take back to the United States and exploit within his own, if you like, New York constituency.
And so, he was very effective as a lawyer and as a campaigner for justice, because he would do thingsfor example, seeing that people might be extradited to the United States, take up the battle at the place of extraditionfor example, here in the United Kingdom, with one of my other lawyers, both on my case and in relation to some alleged terrorism cases, Gareth Peirce. Other lesser lawyers, lesser human beings, might have gone, "Well, I can get the glory, and I can get the credit, once that person is extradited to the United States, and then can bethe trial can be exploited, and great precedence can be set in the United States." Michael was much more concerned, at a human level, to take action early in the process, and try and stop grand juries or try and stop extraditions, before the person entered in to a U.S. justice system that has become increasingly difficult to deal with.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, I wanted to go to a video produced by the Ratner family to mark Michael's 60th birthday, talking about his legal legacy.

BETH STEVENS: He has worked on a series of cases in different areas that are just pushing the ability to raise international human rights in U.S. courts.

REPORTER: For Helen Todd, nothing could justify the East Timor massacre, which killed her son Kamal. And today, a United States court agreed.

HELEN TODD: It's been a long time, and I've come halfway around the world. But I feel satisfied that at last a court has said, "This is wrong."

REPORTER: Kamal was one of 200 killed in the student protest. And the Indonesian general who ordered his troops to open fire has now been ordered to pay.

MICHAEL RATNER: And it affected the judge very heavily. The judge, who wouldwas not familiar with this law, not familiarprobably didn't know East Timor from, you know, Timbuktu, was incrediblyyou could see she was incredibly moved. And we all leftleft, I think, feelingyou know, feeling bad, obviously, about what happened, but very, very good that we had gottenafter a lot of work and a lot of people's efforts, gotten it to a trial where it was really heard.

LIZZIE RATNER: He's really, I think, helped pioneer this type of tort law, where you can actually sue dictators or sue war criminals from within the United States.

BETH STEVENS: I found out early in one fall that this general was studying at the Harvard School of Government. And the students worked for most of the school year pulling together information about the general's role in genocide in Guatemala.

RAY BRESCIA: We needed to develop some of the facts, and the only way that we could really do some pieces were to actually interview the general. And so I sort of posed as this student doing some research on Guatemala.

BETH STEVENS: Michael and I flew up to Boston and went to Harvard graduation with the papers in hand.

RAY BRESCIA: Michael is not afraid to sue anyone at any time.

BETH STEVENS: He's still wearing his Harvard graduation robes, and the process server, with a big smile, held out the papers, called his name, shook his hand. And General Gramajo took the papers with a big smile.

LIZZIE RATNER: And he's won these huge cases. But, of course, many of the dictators have not forked over the billions of dollars that their victims are due.

AMY GOODMAN: That, an excerpt of a family video that was produced for Michael Ratner's 60th birthday. That story that you heard, the attorney Beth Stevens talking about the lawsuit against Héctor Alejandro Gramajo, who was graduating from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In the corner, you see Michael's profile. I was there, along with journalist Allan Nairn, as they, Beth Stevens and Michael Ratner and the private investigator, slapped Héctor Alejandro Gramajo with this lawsuit as he was walking in to get his Harvard Kennedy School degree, slapping him with a lawsuit for crimes against humanity.
We are joined by a roundtable of people to remember Michael Ratner, who died on Wednesday of complications due to cancer here in New York City, Michael Ratner, the longtime former head of the Center for Constitutional Rights. We're joined by Michael Smith, his colleague, co-author and friend, as well, Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch and Jules Lobel, joining us from Pittsburgh, Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Give us the span of his work, Reed.
REED BRODY: You know, from defending human rights in the United States to defending Central American revolutions against the United States, from defending HIV-positive Haitians quarantined in Guantánamo to defending Muslims taken to Guantánamo 10 years later, you know, from defending foreignfrom suing American torturers abroad to suing, as we saw, foreign torturers in America, to defending whistleblowers. Over 50 years, Michael was always instinctively on the right side of every battle, fighting the right battle from the right trench. You know, he had this unerring ability to know where to be at the right time.
AMY GOODMAN: Reed, you were arrested with Michael in 1984. Can you talkand William Kunstler, right?
REED BRODY: Yes. It was
AMY GOODMAN: And Arthur Kinoy? Can you talk about the circumstances?
REED BRODY: Sure. I had actually just come back from Nicaragua, where I documented systematic atrocities by the U.S.-backed contras, who were trying to undermine the Sandinista revolution. And there was a sit-in at the Federal Building in downtown Manhattan, organized by the National Lawyers Guild. And Michael was there, Bill Kunstler, Arthur Kinoy, Barbara Dudley, Ron Kuby, [Marilyn] Clements. And we were allwe were all arrested. But Michael didn't stop there. When the International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered that the United States stop funding and supporting the contras, Michael and Jules Lobel and the CCR went into court, saying, "Well, you know, let's enforce this order."
And actually, Michael asked me to go down to Nicaragua to talk to Americans who might be in harm's way if the courtif contra funding continued. And I interviewed and took an affidavit from a friend named Ben Linder, who wrote in his affidavit that if the United States kept funding the contras, he was in danger of life and limb. And, of course, the lawsuit failed. The aid to thean injunction was not granted. And Ben Linder was killed, the first American to be executed, the only American to be executed, by the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua. And then Michael defended the Linder family for many years in their suits against the contras and against the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Michael Smith, for years, you co-hosted a show, Law and Disorder, with Michael Ratner. Talk about
AMY GOODMAN: On WBAI.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On WBAI, yes. Talk about how you first met him, and also his perspective on the law and how lawyers dealt with the law.
MICHAEL SMITH: I lived around the corner from Michael 30-some years ago. Michael had just gotten elected as the president of the National Lawyers Guild. I was in a four-floor walkup, and he schlepped up one night, and he asked me if I would be on the editorial board of Guild Notes, which is the guild magazine. So he signed me up, and that's when we started out working together. We did six books together. He did the foreword or the introduction or a chapter in a number of them.
We did the Che Guevara book. Michael greatly loved and admired Che, and he suspected that the U.S. story about Che's death was BS. And so he did a FOIA request. And years went by, and nothing happened. And then, one dayand he was telling me. We were walking down the street, and he said, "You know," he said, "I just got this huge box of documents from the FBI and the CIA and the Defense Department and the White House. And what should we do?" So, I was representing Ocean Press at the time. And I called them up, and I said, "I think we've got a book here. Can you hold up putting out your catalog 'til we look through it?" And they said, "Sure." So, Michael and I and my wife Debbie looked through it, and we figured it out, and we put it all together, and we sent it down to Australia. We put out our first book. We were on the show with you, Amy. It was 20 years ago.
And then, out of nowhere, 10 years later, without Michael making a further request, he got another box of documents. And we looked at those. And there had been a lot of historical work done in the meantime. So we were able to take these new documentsI mean, stuff on White House stationery that said, "The troops we trained finally got him," a memo to Johnson, the president, stuff like that. And we put the story together. And we realized that there was a prior agreement with the Bolivian dictatorship. The CIA had two agents that were running intelligence. The Department of Defense was funding everything from ballots to bullets, funding the Bolivian army that captured Che. The CIA agents were working the intelligence. They captured Che. And they had a prior agreement with the head of the Bolivian military that if they captured, then they'd kill him. And so, that was America's doing, and we proved that. And that book is all over Cuba. They sell it for 25 cents. It was featured last year at the International Book Fair. It's all over Argentina, where Cheand it's even coming out now in Iran in Farsi, and it's going to be distributed in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. So, Michael made a contribution there.
AMY GOODMAN: And Che Guevara killed in October 1967 in Bolivia.
MICHAEL SMITH: That's right. And the moral responsibility for that, the actual responsibility for the assassination, which was a political murder, lies on the United States. There's no statute of limitations to murder. The two people that directed the killing are still alive. They're in Florida.
AMY GOODMAN: They are?
MICHAEL SMITH: And that was one of the many contributions that Michael made.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole issue of he was a lawyer who did not really overestimate the power or the requirements of the law?
MICHAEL SMITH: He didn't think thathe deeply believed in democracy and the rule of law. And he didn't think that capitalism was compatible with that. He thought maybe fascism was, but certainly notand we can see, what's going on now, he was absolutely clear-sighted on that. Michael initially started off, like all of us, as, you know, liberals, thinking that the law was a civilized way of solving disputes. It may flawed here or there, but it could be fixed and so on. Well, we all quickly got over that notion. And Michael came to believe that the law was a means of social control by the 1 percent, who would fight to keep their control, by any means necessary, as long as possible. And that was what the law was. And Michael sought to promote true democratic law and to undermine that false ideology that thought that the law we have now is somehow fair. It's not fair.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to a moment with you, Michael Smith, and Michael Ratner. This was July [20th] in Washington, D.C., at the reopening of the Cuban Embassy after it was closed for more than five decades. Michael was drenched in sweat. It was boiling hot. But it was one of the happiest times I had ever seen Michael Ratner, as he talked about the significance of this historic day.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Amy, let's just say, other than the birth of my children, this is perhaps one of the most exciting days of my life. I mean, I've been working on Cuba since the early '70s, if not before. I worked on the Venceremos Brigade. I went on brigades. I did construction. And to see that this can actually happen in a country that decided early on that, unlike most countries in the world, it was going to level the playing field for everyoneno more rich, no more poor, everyone the same, education for everyone, schooling for everyone, housing if they couldand to see the relentless United States go against it, from the Bay of Pigs to utter subversion on and on, and to see Cuba emerge victoriousand when I say that, this is not a defeated country. This is a countryif you heard the foreign minister today, what he spoke of was the history of U.S. imperialism against Cuba, from the intervention in the Spanish-American War to the Platt Amendment, which made U.S. a permanent part of the Cuban government, to the taking of Guantánamo, to the failure to recognize it in 1959, to the cutting off of relations in 1961. This is a major, major victory for the Cuban people, and that should be understood. We are standing at a moment that I never expected to see in our history.

AMY GOODMAN: Bruno Rodríguez, the foreign minister of Cuba, gave a rousing speech inside the embassy. Talk about what he said still needs to be accomplished. He wasn't exactly celebrating a total victory today.

MICHAEL SMITH: No, because things still aren't normal.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Smith.

MICHAEL SMITH: The United States is still spending $30 million a year trying to subvert the Cuban government. They still illegally are holding Guantánamo. And they still haveand this is the most important thing, because it's costing Cuban people $1.1 trillion in funds to develop their countrythey still have the blockade. So, unless those three things are changed, you're not going to have a normal situation.

MICHAEL RATNER: Let me tell you, as someone said to me here, if Obama wants to solve Guantánamo and the prisoners at Guantánamo, give it back to Cuba. There will be no prisoners left in Guantánamo. Easy way to do it, satisfy the Cubans, satisfy Guantánamo. Let it happen now.

Think about Cuba's place in history, when we think about it for young people, not just for the fact that it leveled a society economically, gave people all the social network that we don't have in the United States, but think about its international role. You think about apartheid in South Africa, and the key single event took place in Angola when 25,000 Cuban troops repulsed the South African military and gave it its first defeat, which was the beginning of the end of apartheid. It had an internationalism that's just unbelievable. And I remember standing in front ofin the 100,000 people in front of a square in Havana in 1976. I was on a Venceremos Brigade. And Fidel gave a speech, and he said, "There is black blood in every Cuban vein, and we are going into Angola." I'm telling you, I still cry over it.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Michael Ratner speaking July [20th], 2015, at the opening of the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C., after it had been closed for more than 50 years.