January 28, 2009

Michael Ratner

President Barack Obama has gotten a lot of attention for the executive order he signed last week to close the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now that there's some real action on the Gitmo issue, the public may be tempted to forget the heroes who have been fighting against the injustice of illegal detention since the very beginning. BuzzFlash is not so tempted.

Michael Ratner is one of those heroes. As the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit human rights litigation organization founded during the Civil Rights movement, Ratner works to protect civil liberties as a professor, lawyer, and author.

Ratner is a Jewish lawyer who had to run for his life away from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Still, even that trauma couldn't wipe away the three decades he's spent defending civil rights. Instead, he continued defending the legal rights of Guantanamo detainees, despite intense criticism and even death threats.

Whether it was HIV-positive Haitians seeking asylum or supposed enemy combatants seeking the ability to contest their detentions in court, Ratner has had successes in trials against the institution of Guantanamo. Now that the detention facility, which has been operating under often contentious legal grounds since the 1970s, is to be closed within a year, we wanted to thank Ratner and others who have been working for justice all these years.

Just because Guantanamo is closing, however, doesn't mean the movement will rest on its laurels. A Center for Constitutional Rights press release issued after Obama signed the order expressed guarded optimism:

"We welcome the beginning of the end of lawlessness. Under the previous administration, executive orders became synonymous with secrecy, torture and attempts to override the Constitution. It is genuinely uplifting to see them now used to set things right. President Obama's orders today are an important first step in restoring the rule of law; let us take the next steps with great care not to open the way for a return to the darkness of these last years.

The order to close Guantanamo, though it provides little detail and allows perhaps too much time to get it done given the pressing issues at stake, is a good start."

Ratner himself has no intention of taking a break now that Bush is gone. Not only is he pushing Obama to speed up the process of closing Guantanamo and challenging the new president to stand by his campaign promises of how to go about it, but he also calls for the prosecution of Bush Administration officials for war crimes.

In a recent blog entry, he wrote that the country must "make it clear, just as we do in cases with the most minor offenses, that actions have consequences. A failure to initiate a criminal investigation of the torture program will only encourage future law breaking by sending a message of impunity. The message that we need to send is that the torture conspirators will be held accountable. That is the only way to fulfill Obama's promise."

For his tenacious adherence to the principle of rule of law and his consistent defense of the Constitution, we bestow upon Michael Ratner this week's BuzzFlash Wings of Justice Award. It is no doubt partially thanks to Ratner and others such as him that we can begin to say goodbye to the dishonor of Guantanamo. Thankfully, we can also count on Ratner to uphold the idea of accountability.

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