Ratner, Michael

RATNER, MICHAEL (1943-2016). Michael David Ratner was born in Cleveland, Ohio to a large Polish Jewish immigrant family. He was educated at Brandeis University (1961 -1966) and Columbia University Law School (1966 -1970) where he finished first in his class and was an editor of the Columbia Law Review.

Upon graduating, Ratner clerked for the first African American woman federal judge, Constance Baker Motley, practiced criminal law for a short time, and began working as a staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights(CCR) in 1971. His first assignment was to interview prisoners at Attica state prison near Buffalo, New York, where a rebellion had been murderously suppressed on orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Ratner spent forty-five years at the CCR, becoming first the director of litigation and then the president of what Alexander Cockburn called “a small band of tigerish people." He helped set the nonprofit CCR on firm financial footing as a premier human rights litigation organization.

Ratner's final case, which he worked on until he died, was representing truth telling whistleblower political prisoner Julian Assange, then the editor of WikiLeaks. In 2010 Assange embarrassed the United States by publishing the Iraq war logs and the Afghanistan war logs and hundreds of diplomatic cables exposing the fraud of “the war on terrorism.” In the cache Assange published, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, was a video showing an American helicopter gunship shooting Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad street, including two Reuters journalists and children.

In perhaps his most significant effort, Ratner organized more than 600 attorneys and brought the landmark Rasul v Bush (2004) case against the Bush administration. The case went to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the right of habeas corpus for the war-on-terror prisoners held incommunicado in Guantánamo Bay, America’s offshore prison camp. The court ruled that American law did indeed apply to these men. They could not be held indefinitely and had to be informed of the charges against them and allowed a trial. Ratner's legal intervention stopped torture at Guantánamo and freed more than 300 prisoners.

With his friend, the German Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck, Ratner founded the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and served as its president.

He also helped found Chicago-based Palestine Legal to protect the constitutional rights of people and organizations speaking out in support of Palestinians.

Ratner served as the president of the National Lawyers Guild. In 2004 he co-founded with attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Dalia Hashad, and Michael Steven Smith the show Law And Disorder Radio, which was broadcast on many stations around the country and on the Internet at lawanddisorder.org.

Michael Ratner wrote numerous articles and books. These include his autobiography Raising the Bar (2020); Who Killed Che: How the CIA Got Away With Murder (2011); The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book (2008); and Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st Century America (2011).

Rule of Law Oral History Project –Michael Ratner. Interview. September 12, 2013, by Ron Grele. Columbia Center for Oral History. https://www.ccohr.incite.columbia.edu/michael-ratner