Mr. Ratner tells Paul Jay that he warned of a growing police state a month after 9/11, as constitutional rights continue to evaporate in the name of national security. This is an episode of Reality Asserts Itself, produced March 13, 2014 with Paul Jay.
STORY TRANSCRIPT
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. Iâm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And this is Reality Asserts Itself with our guest Michael Ratner, who joins us again in the studio.
Thanks for joining us again, Michael.
MICHAEL RATNER, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: Always good to be with you, Paul.
JAY: So, Michael, one more time, is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Heâs a board member of The Real News Network. And heâs the American lawyer for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. And if you want to know more about Michael, thereâs lots of biography down below, but most importantly, this whole series of interviews is about Michaelâs life, so just watch it.
So weâre going to pick upâweâre going to kind of jump ahead. We were in the â80s, and weâre kind of running out of time, so weâre going to kind of do the â90s another time, more or less, and weâre going to pick up in 2001, because since the attack on the World Trade Center, this has defined a lot of your life over the last more than decade.
You actually saw it happen.
RATNER: I was in my house in downtown and I was going out for a run, and Iâm going down, running past the World Trade Center. A beautiful eggshell blue day, sunny. Iâm running past the World Trade Center, and I hear this huge explosion. And I look up, and I see one of the World Trade Centers just enveloped in flames almost immediately. I stop, I walk over to a construction site, and we see the outline of a plane right in the building. It looks like a plane just flew right directly into it. And we had no idea it was terrorism, none at all, zero, standing there with the other construction workers. Our cell phones are still working, as I recall, then, and we call people and say, whatâs going on, and they say, well, it looks like a plane flew in.
And then Iâm just standing down there watching, and aboutâmaybe it was 20 minutes later, I see a plane. It looks like coming up the Hudson, from the south. Iâm not sure, but I think south. And Iâm thinking, well, that plane is there to inspect the damage on the building and maybe drop water on top of it. Thatâs howâwe did not expect this. And instead, that plane turns around, comes around to the back side, and flies right into the other World Trade Center building. At that point I say, well, this is really bad. This is intentional. Itâs terrorismâor, I mean, I didnât use that word. Iâm not sure.
But then I got actually really scared. And then I have two kids in schools that are right in that neighborhood. And then I just run home as fast as I can, thinking, whatâs going to happen next, whatâs going to blow up next. At that point thereâs no cell service. Everythingâs gone.
At that point IâmâI just run home. I go to my apartment. And we make sure our kids are safe. In fact, one of the planes had flown within a few hundred feet over my daughterâs school. We go get our kids at the schools.
And at that point what do you do? Well, first we stand on the street. And you can see down 7th Avenue, and you can see the buildings just in flames, and you just actually saw them pancake to the bottom. I mean, we saw the whole thing.
And with our kids, we picked them up. And we want to do something constructive. So we get all the kids from the school, a dozen kids at our house, and we make sandwiches together to bring to the hospital or to bring somewhere where we think there are going to be survivors. In fact, of course, there werenât people who really needed our sandwiches.
And, you know, itâs obviously an incredible thing we saw. My kids were ten and 12.
For the next two weeks the cityâmore than thatâthe cityâs just in mourning. And because I live downtown, thereâs ash everywhere, thereâs the smell everywhere for weeks, just weeks of it. And friends are living in my houseâthe ones who lived right nearby had to abandon their houses completely.
And then you go to these vigils, and thereâs just, like, boards, like, 20, 30 feet, with tags on them: Have you seen my father? Have you seen my mother? You know, people wondering whatâs happened to their parents.
And then you knew people, obviously, âcause we were living downtown in New York, you know, you know, my kidâs soccer coach or something. You know, just you knew people.
JAY: Within a month, or just a little over a month of that day, you write a piece called âWeâre Moving towards a Police Stateâ.
RATNER: You know, my reaction to it was that it was so horrendous, what I saw and felt then. And there was such talk of war in the country, and Bush gives his, you know, crusade speech, that weâre going to go on a crusadeâgreat choice of words. On September 18, Congress passes the Authorization to Use Military Force very close to that time. The Patriot Act is passed six weeks afterwards. Youâre getting a whole set of both laws that are going to allow massive surveillance and, you know, all kinds of other things to people all over the world, and youâre getting the authorization to use war whenever you want, the president wants to, anywhere in the world, that he can go after, even in the United States, the authorization to use military force. And youâre getting this bellicose speech.
And Iâm sitting there saying to myself, look what Iâve just seen. The last thing I want to do is visit war on another population. Thatâs the last thing. I mean, what a horrible thing to do. Look what Iâve just seen, and war is much worse. War isâI mean, 3,000 people is horrible, but a million people in Iraq, which is what we have now, probably, isâI mean, you canâtâitâs unfathomable.
So Iâm sitting there saying, I donât want a war. This should be treated as a crime, and we should find out who the perpetrators are, get them arrested, and get them tried.
And then, of course, thereâs no context as to why it happened. You couldnât even ask. You know. And I think I remember Susan Sontag wrote something about why, and she basically was drummed out of the world, practically. I mean, so you couldnât even speak up.
But Iâm looking at it, and here I am. I have this long history, obviously, of protecting civil rights and civil liberties, and I understand something about context, although people knew nothing about being a Muslim then, anybody, even sophisticated people. Just nothing. Nothing. This is a blank. [incompr.] the FBI, I think, had two Arabic translators. The whole thing is, like, you knowâit was just this, likeâwhatever.
So Iâm looking at it and saying, look at this repression thatâs coming down on us. Weâre basically building a police state here. Weâre going to be allowing, basically, unauthorized wiretapping, which we didnât even know about, the warrantless wiretapping. What they already had done was so bad that we came out against it.
Immigrationâwe had clients picked up all over the city, Muslims. Because you were between a certain age, from certain countries, they would just be jailing you. And then they checkerboard you around various jails, and you couldnât find your clients. We got calls from mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers: Whereâs my son? Whereâs my son? Hundreds of those people picked up all over, and beaten, and put in those three-piece chained suits, beaten, done nothing, zero, nothing wrong. They were Muslim of a certain age and the wrong country. Then a program to fingerprint and question every single Muslim between 18 and 35 in the country who was here on an immigrant visa. Every single one. I mean, so it was really strong.
And then the wars. You know, first, obviously, the bombing of Afghanistan. And that was interestingly tricky, because I opposed the war, completely opposed the war. Apart from there being some negotiations about [incompr.] the Taliban and turning over bin Laden at an international court, I just thought it was going to be hundreds of thousands killed or tens of thousands killed.
And interestingly, some people who were normally antiwar didnât oppose it. They were so appalled by 9/11 that they actually left their reason and their understanding of who this country is, they left it in a ditch somewhere. And I actually had some debates with people who, by the end, they realized that I was right, even before the war. But it was a serious moment to come out against that war. And a lot of good people, unfortunately, supported that war. So there was first the Afghan War, which weâre still seeing today, a country thatâs destroyed that now has, you know, the highest opium production in the world.
So Iâm sitting there. I write these articles. I start doing that. Very little is picked up on it, very few allies.
And then, on November 14, 2001, President Bush issues whatâs called Military Order No. 1. Thatâs the Guantanamo order. Thatâs the one that says, Iâm the president, we can pick up people anywhere in the world at that point, non-citizens [incompr.] citizens, anywhere in the world, and we can hold them forever. And if we try them, theyâre going to be tried in special military commissions.
And Iâsitting at the office, and Iâm saying to my colleagues, we have toâand theyâwe have to challenge this. They abolished the writ of habeas corpus, etc. And no one would go with us, literally no one. No other human rights organization. A couple of other lawyers went with us, but no other human rights organization. And so weâre out there alone saying, weâre going to represent the first people. I have stacks of hate mail 500-high saying, you know, letâyou go see the Taliban, let them go eat your children, all that kind of stuff.
And then it turns out to be Guantanamo where theyâre going to send the people. Thatâs January 11, 2002. [incompr.] you know, theyâre incognito, etc. We wind up deciding to represent the first people at Guantanamo. I had earlier represented Guantanamo people, Haitians who had been at Guantanamo in the early â90s, the HIV Camp, which I was successful with others in closing. This is the second reiteration of Guantanamo and Cuba, and weâre the first people out there.
For the first two years, nothing. I mean, we couldnât get any allies. We couldnât even get our lawyer to file the case initially in Washington for us, âcause we needed a local counsel.
JAY: We have talked about this period quite a bit in other interviews. And you canâweâre going to have a whole page you can get to to see all of Michaelâs interviews. So weâve done a lot of detail on post-9/11âPatriot Act, Guantanamo.
RATNER: Drones. Everything.
JAY: Drones.
RATNER: Weâve done all that stuff. Torture. Weâve done millions [crosstalk]
JAY: Weâre kind of running out of time, so I kind of want to ask you a big-picture question.
RATNER: Okay.
JAY: You have been fighting in many fronts, but your primary front has been fighting on a legal front in courts. You work for somethingâor you didâfor something called the Center for Constitutional Rights,â
RATNER: Still do.
JAY: âwhich presupposes that there is a Constitution and there is a rule of law. So, you know, âMoving towards a Police Stateâ, the title of what you wroteâI mean, in a police state, you donât have a rule of law, you have straight arbitrary power. I mean, there may be some laws, but they donât have much to do with any constitutional rights. To what extent is this still a country where there is a rule of law based on a constitution with rights? I know weâreâyou know, thereâsâsomewhere, I guess, you have, you know, a pole, which is, like, some kind of Hitlerite police state, where there are no rights; at some point you have, you know, some people would call a democracyâsome people might call it a bourgeois democracy, but still there is constitutional rights, and you can go to court and win some cases. Where are we on this?
RATNER: Let me just say, you know, underlying the philosophy of the Center for Constitutional Rights and my own is that social change happens through activism, and that the role of lawyers like me, in generalâthere are some exceptionsâin general, is to support social movements. So itâs supporting the antiwar movement in Central America. In the Guantanamo case it was a little different, because we didnât have a social movement. There we had to do something that I donât often do: go into a court, trying to actually win any kind of legal right, so that we can even visit the people and stop what became torture. So the Center was founded out of representing movements. So I look at courts as an adjunct to that, sometimes used and sometimes not.
To answer your question, I would say to some extent it depends. So, for example, the Center for Constitutional Rights recently won the stop-and-frisk case in New York. Yes, we had a terrible mayor, Bloomberg, who wasnât going to enforce it, who appealed it. Now we have a mayor who at least didnât appeal it, and now weâre going to have a change on that. But even that, there were 40 organizations from across all walks of life, all races, all religions, with us in that case, grassroots organizations doing the work. The lawsuit became the way in which we could translate that into a victory, ultimately.
But to answer your question, on that kind of constitutional right weâre not at the end of the road yet. We [incompr.] similar case we won against the New York City Fire Department for discrimination. You know, it had 3 percent blacks in a city thatâs 30 percent, 25 percent blackâI mean, incredible, in New York. This is, like, racist to the core. So that kind of stuff, I think, is still there to litigate. Although people say, oh, we have a black, you know, president, we haveâall this stuff is over, you still have problems on that.
On the other fundamental rights Iâm talking about, the wayâthe rights to free speech, the right to be free from a search, the right to be free from arbitrary imprisonment, those are evaporating in the name of national security. Thereâs just no question about it. Those we donât win anymore. We won a theoretical right to get people out of Guantanamo, for example, by testing their detentions in court, but the courts have never actuallyâor one exceptionâever ordered the release of anybody from Guantanamo, because theyâll give us the theoretical oh, yeah, you have a right to go to court, but weâre not going to give it to you.
Recently, the court just held we have a right to challenge peopleâs conditions at Guantanamo that they live under. For 12 years we havenât had that right. All of a sudden they gave us that right, 12 years later. The first condition we challenged was the forced feeding of people at Guantanamo on a hunger strike, strapped into a chair, tubes down the nose, the whole business, and the court said, well, thatâs okay. So youâreâthe answer is that I think, on the fundamental rights of our security, I mean, of our constitutional security, I think those have evaporated to a large extent.
JAY: And they seem to be creating the legal framework, which theyâre not, as far as I know, really using yet, but a legal framework for a full-fledged police state, the NDAA amendment, which allows the army to actually arrest people, you know, for having some kind of association with terrorism. It seems pretty vague, you know, what they have to prove to do that.
RATNER: Well, that, coupled with the national surveillance state. I mean, everything we say and do, every association I have, if and when thereâs ever another Occupy Wall Street or Occupy this or a revolution in the streets, you know, [incompr.] cold, theyâd pick people up cold. No, we have theâcertainly the framework is there for imposing, you know, very heavy measures against citizens and people in this country.
JAY: The media, whichâlike, if you follow The New York Times and some of the other conventional media, they will do a story on the NSA spying. They will pick pieces of the surveillance state. But in terms of the mediaâyou know, people understanding the extent to which this legal framework has been created, the shift away from constitutional rights, the media seems to just either blindly go along with this, is afraid to stick your neck out and say anything. The debate over that NDAA amendment was mostly in the independent alternative press. The mainstream media barely talked about what to me is one of the more dramatic pieces of legislation thatâs been passed in a long time.
RATNER: Yeah, no, the media has been terrible on this issue and not taking on what I consider to be the big issues.
You know, so right now, as you said, Iâm representing WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, and Iâve done a lot of interviews for you about that. But on this whole issue of surveillance, on what the state can do to pick people up on arbitrary detention, I think weâre at a real crucial turning point. I mean, I look at Snowden or Julian or Jeremy Hammond, whoâs in for the Stratfor hacks, or Barrett Brown or other ofâor Sarah Harrison, whoâs sitting in Berlin, who took Snowden from Berlin to MoscowâI mean, from Hong Kong to Moscow. Weâre at the verge of deciding howâwhatâs going to happen in the future. Is it going to be a state in which the government, from a vertical point of view, controls the internet completely, controls our information completely, and knows everything about our lives? Or are we going to be able to make it more horizontal, where we can actually have some kind of democracy? And I think these people, in my view, are heroes, because theyâre taking on the state much like people took on the state in the â60s. And I do a comparison with that. And the state is repressing them much like they did in the â60s and passing laws to make sure that they canât do that.
But the press has just been, as you said, I think, piecemeal in a terrible way. I mean, even I follow this stuff very closely. You know, do I have a really big picture of whatâs happening? Absolutely not.
JAY: Thanks for joining us. Weâre going to continue this, Iâm sure, many times.
RATNER: Thanks for having me, Paul. And thanks for this wonderful new studio. I love it here.
JAY: Well, thank you.
And thank you for joining us on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News.
