The Terrorists' Legal Team

If you thought the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union was bad, wait till you read about the ultra-left "public interest" law firm called the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in “The Terrorists’ Legal Team.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights is openly anti-American and pro-terrorist. Groups suspected of ties to terrorism give money to CCR. The granddaughter of the executed Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg works there. The late (second) wife of the traitor Alger Hiss left money to CCR in her will. Actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon fund CCR, as does singer Natalie Merchant and 1940s Communist relic Pete Seeger (the folk singer from The Weavers). Insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, a kingpin of George Soros’s “Democracy Alliance,” writes big checks to CCR, as does Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Although CCR is headquartered in New York City’s Greenwich Village, it’s not a bunch of latte-sipping do-nothing artsy dreamers who sit around comparing notes on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. These are dedicated revolutionaries who, quite literally, want to overthrow the American system of government. Look on their website and you’ll see the same kind of revolutionary Communist catch-phrases that you’ll find in the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Mao Zedong.

Its current president, Michael Ratner, is an adjunct law professor at Columbia University. He served as special counsel to Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Marxist who was overthrown in 2004. Ratner is a classic limousine liberal, or more accurately, a Rolls Royce revolutionary. His family controls Forest City Enterprises, Inc., a nearly $8 billion real estate development company that has been accused of eminent domain abuse. His brother, Bruce, is the owner of the New Jersey Nets.

What’s the connection between Communism and Islamism? CCR hates America so it decided to align itself with terrorists who hate America. It seems CCR and its supporters believe that Islamic Fascist terrorists are freedom fighters and spokesmen for legitimate national liberation movements. After the Soviet Union collapsed around 1991 under the weight of 70 years of failed socialist policies, CCR “made a seamless transition from an alliance with Communism to an alliance with Islamofascism in the name of the United States Constitution,” in the words last year of the Power Line blog.

CCR has enjoyed much success in its legal fight against the U.S. government’s War on Terror, most notably in Rasul v. Bush in which the firm was counsel. (It filed “amicus curiae” briefs in other WOT cases as well.) Rasul is the infamous 2004 case in which the Supreme Court ruled (6 to 3) that CCR’s clients, 16 foreign nationals captured during U.S. hostilities with the Taliban in Afghanistan, had the legal right to challenge their detentions in U.S. civilian courts.

Some people might ask ‘well, what’s the big deal?’ Why can’t we try terrorists in civilian courts?’ Well, there are some problems with that.

Despite some recent back-pedaling, the Bush administration takes the position, which is well-established in U.S. law and international law, that terrorist fighters –such as al-Qaeda operatives— are not entitled to protection under the law of war. Terrorists are what the law calls “unlawful combatants.” Fighting a war by doing things like not wearing a uniform is a serious war crime. Such deception has long been considered immoral and illegal is because it allows unlawful combatants to hide in a society, endangering the civilian population by making it difficult to distinguish civilians from enemy soldiers. Traditionally, the position of the law has been that such conduct is so dangerous and morally reprehensible that when these people are captured they should not be elevated to prisoner of war (or “lawful combatant”) status. America’s terrorist enemies should not be able to waste U.S. resources by weighing down the civilian legal system in endless litigation. Wars are supposed to be waged on battlefields, not in U.S. courtrooms.

But what is most galling to me is CCR’s continuing defense of the convicted terrorist conspirator Lynne Stewart. Stewart was the lawyer for the blink sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman (now a permanent guest in a U.S. Supermax facility), head of an Egyptian Islamist terrorist group called al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. Members of that group killed 62 people in Luxor, Egypt in 1997, in an effort to put pressure on the U.S. to free the sheik. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated after the sheik issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill him.

Stewart did NOT, as CCR and her other supporters claim, merely do her job as a lawyer. After President Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, made Stewart sign an agreement in which she agreed not to pass on her dangerous terrorist client’s messages to the outside world, she ignored it. Stewart passed on the sheik’s message to reporters who wrote news stories indicating that the sheik wanted his group to call off a ceasefire it had with the government of Egypt. In other words, Lynne Stewart told al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya it’s OK to start killing people again, you have the sheik’s blessing, so get on with it. Lynne Stewart, whom the Washington Post has playfully labeled a “grandmotherly Marxist,” attempted to cause a terrorist attack and she deserves to be punished. Her sentencing, which was supposed to take place yesterday, September 25, was postponed. Now she is set to be sentenced October 16.

CCR gave Lynne Stewart a soapbox earlier this year, interviewing her on its radio show, “Law and Disorder.” (The two-part interview was broadcast on July 24 and July 31 and is archived at http://lawanddisorder.org.)

(I wrote the hyperlinked article. I’m an analyst-editor at Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. I used to be a regular blogger too, and I still occasionally post at www.redstate.com and at The Shotgun.)

here's Horowitz's info on this bunch:

CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS (CCR)
Founded by pro-Castro radicals
Opposes post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws
"If the U.S. government truly wants its people to be safer and wants terrorist threats to diminish, it must make fundamental changes in its foreign policies . . . particularly its unqualified support for Israel, and its embargo of Iraq, its bombing of Afghanistan, and its actions in Saudi Arabia. [These] continue to anger people throughout the region, and to fertilize the ground where terrorists of the future will take root." - CCR President Michael Ratner
Supports terrorist attorney Lynne Stewart

Characterizing President Bush as a political leader who is "out of control" and engaged in the "reckless abuse of power," the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has produced a new book titled Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush. This screed accuses Bush of "illegally spying on U.S. citizens, lying to the American people about the Iraq war, seizing undue executive power, and sending people to be tortured overseas." CCR exhorts likeminded people to sign its online impeachment petition.

The Center for Constitutional Rights was co-founded in November 1966 by the radical attorneys Morton Stavis, Ben Smith, Arthur Kinoy, and William Kunstler, longtime members of the Communist and radical left. Prior to forming the Center, Kinoy and Kuntsler circulated a lengthy memo calling for the creation of a "new Communist Party," which did not materialize.

Among the most passionate crusades of Kinoy's legal career was his bid to save the lives of the convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. He took similar pride in his heralded 1972 victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government was obliged to obtain a warrant for telephone tapping, even in cases where national security was at stake.

Kunstler defended El Sayyid Nosair, a leader of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's terrorist network responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (as well as thwarted plans to blow up New York's Lincoln and Holland Tunnels). Throughout his radical career, Kunstler defended domestic terrorists and drug dealers (but only, he explained, if they were black). He compared the organizers of the riot at the Chicago Democratic convention (Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin) to Jesus Christ and maintained a policy of never criticizing any "socialist country."

Today the CCR characterizes itself as an organization that "uses litigation proactively to advance the law in a positive direction, to guarantee the rights of those with the fewest protecttions and least access to legal resources." Among those whom the CCR counts as largely "unprotected" are terrorist organizations and illegal immigrants. The CCR is a core activist organization in the Open Borders Lobby, which seeks to eliminate all control of U.S. borders.

In the post-9/11 era, the CCR has focused its efforts heavily on reining in the U.S. government's newly implemented anti-terrorism measures, which the CCR depicts as having "seriously undermined civil liberties, the checks and balances that are essential to the structure of our democratic government, and indeed, democracy itself." "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the government's actions," explains the CCR, "has been its attack on the Bill of Rights, the very cornerstone of our American democracy. The War on Terror has seriously compromised the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights of citizens and non-citizens alike. From the USA Patriot Act's over-broad definition of domestic terrorism, to the FBI's new powers of search and surveillance, to the indefinite detention of both citizens and non-citizens without formal charges, the principles of free speech, due process, and equal protection under the law have been seriously undermined."

Specifically, the CCR has condemned the Bush administration for expanding the authority of security agencies not only to conduct wiretaps and surveillance on suspected terrorists, but also to detain suspected terrorists for longer time periods than ordinary criminals. These measures, says the CCR, unjustifiably "sacrific[e] our political freedoms in the name of national security." When law-enforcement agencies attempted, in the wake of 9/11, to conduct voluntary interviews with several thousand Middle Eastern men who were in the United States on temporary visas, the CCR denounced such "racial profiling"; it made this same charge in response to the government's detention of hundreds of non-citizens from the Middle East for possible terrorist connections. When Attorney General Ashcroft warned that visa violators would henceforth be arrested, the CCR characterized his comments as "chilling." When new regulations permitted the FBI, CIA, and INS can share information about possible terrorist plots with one another, the CCR lamented such assaults on "our privacy."

In March 2002, CCR president Michael Ratner explained his views on the origins of anti-American terrorism. "If the U.S. government truly wants its people to be safer and wants terrorist threats to diminish," he said, "it must make fundamental changes in its foreign policies . . . particularly its unqualified support for Israel, and its embargo of Iraq, its bombing of Afghanistan, and its actions in Saudi Arabia. [These] continue to anger people throughout the region, and to fertilize the ground where terrorists of the future will take root." He further condemned America's post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan - stating that thousands of refugees were being forced to flee, and citing a UN prediction that some 100,000 Afghan children would die as a result of U.S. "aggression." He suggested that, as an alternative to war, the U.S. ought to "treat the attacks on September 11 as a crime against humanity, establish a UN tribunal, extradite the suspects, or if that fails, capture them with a UN force, and try them."

At its 2004 annual convention, the CCR honored attorney Lynne Stewart, an open supporter of terrorism, indicted by the Justice Department for abetting the terrorist activities of her client, the "blind sheik," Omar Abdel Rahman. In April 2002 Stewart was indicted on charges that she had illegally "facilitated and concealed communications" between the incarcerated Sheik and members of his Egyptian terrorist organization, the Islamic Group, which has ties to al Qaeda. The CCR called Stewart's indictment "an attack on attorneys who defend controversial figures, and an attempt to deprive these clients of the zealous representation that may be required." Shortly thereafter, Stewart announced that she planned to provide legal representation for Sheik Rahman's son Ahmed, whom U.S. forces in Afghanistan captured in November 2001, and who was believed to be a liaison between the Islamic Group and al Qaeda.

The CCR was a signatory to a March 17, 2003 letter exhorting members of the U.S. Congress "to oppose the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (DSEA), also known as 'Patriot [Act] II,'" which was then under consideration. These signatories stated that the new legislation "fail[ed] to respect our time-honored liberties," and "contain[ed] a multitude of new and sweeping law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers . . . that would severely dilute, if not undermine, many basic constitutional rights." In addition, the CCR has given its organizational endorsement to the Community Resolution to Protect Civil Liberties campaign, a project of the California-based Coalition for Civil Liberties (CCL). The CLL tries to influence city councils to pass resolutions creating Civil Liberties Safe Zones; that is, to be non-compliant with the provisions of the Patriot Act.

A member organization of the Abolition 2000 and United For Peace and Justice anti-war coalitions, the CCR endorsed the Civil Liberties Restoration Act (CLRA) of 2004, which was introduced by Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, Russell Feingold, Richard Durbin, and Jon Corzine, and Democratic Representatives Howard Berman and William Delahunt. The CLRA was designed to roll back, in the name of protecting civil liberties, vital national-security policies that had been adopted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In March 2005, CCR joined with the parents of deceased anti-Israel activist Rachel Corrie (who was accidentally crushed to death while trying to obstruct the path of a bulldozer being used in anti-terror operations by Israeli Defense Force soldiers in Gaza) in filing a federal lawsuit against Caterpillar Inc, the Illinois-based company that manufactured not only the bulldozer that ran over Miss Corrie, but also many other bulldozers used for anti-terror operations by the IDF. CCR argued that Caterpillar violated international and state laws by providing specially designed bulldozers to the IDF for the purpose of demolishing Palestinian terrorists' homes and strongholds. In response, the American company said in a public statement that "Caterpillar shares the world's concern over unrest in the Middle East, and we certainly have compassion for all those affected by the political strife. However, more than 2 million Caterpillar machines and engines are at work in virtually every country and region of the world each day. We have neither the legal right nor the means to police individual use of the equipment."

This statement did not satisfy Jennie Green, a Senior Attorney with CCR, who argued that "International law clearly provides that corporations can be held accountable for violations of international human rights. Rachel Corrie, a young American killed abroad because Caterpillar purposefully turns a blind eye as to how their products are used, must have access to justice." According to CCR, since 2001 Israel has used Caterpillar bulldozers to destroy more than 4,000 Palestinian homes, as well as to kill and injure many Palestinians. The lawsuit against Caterpillar sought at least $75,000 in compensatory damages, punitive damages and other relief. According to legal experts, CCR's case against Caterpillar marked the first time that U.S. citizens had filed suit against a U.S. corporation for alleged misdeeds in a foreign country. It also marked the first time that lawsuits involving a single event were filed simultaneously in both American and foreign courts.

CCR is supported, in part, by generous donations from the Ford Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Public Welfare Foundation.

http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6148

Here's the home page, fyi:

http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/default.asp

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